African Cinema of the 2010s

Abstract

African Cinema of the 2010s Olivier Barlet (bio) Translated by Chloe Farrell Here we are, and the decade is nearly over. Is another chapter underway?1 Below is an exploration of recent films that have marked this period. (The numbers following the nation names in parentheses with each film title link to the film's page at sudplanete.net, accessible by typing the number into the search bar on the website. Criticism and other articles are linked on the film's page.) The Intimate Anchored in History Anchoring and Hybridity It is not here a question of focusing, once again, on the intimate to speak about the world nor of the opposition between the singular and the collective. There is nothing new in that idea. Nevertheless, today a new dimension inscribes itself in the designation "I"—that reference to the Romanesque which, since the 1980s, has allowed for a distancing from a sense of duty toward national construction and toward the community. "It's dark, it's pitch black. I grew up with that darkness that becomes progressively lighter as one moves elsewhere; one discovers what it was hiding." In Les Deux visages d'une femme bamiléké / The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman (2016, Cameroon, 17935), Rosine Mbakam returns to her homeland after an absence of seven years. She films at home, at work, in the marketplace—those places marked by her mother's influence and by her childhood, those places that she left behind when she chose to return her fiancé's dowry and move far away. She documents this claim to freedom, to an exterior freedom that becomes interior. Yet this individuation is not a mark of individualism. The designation "us" is important. The individual and the collective intertwine, are always [End Page 226] intertwined. To go even further with this idea, moving beyond the family unit, individual destiny is inseparable from social and political history. We are in Cameroon, where the memory of the atrocities of colonialism is painful: "For my mother, the French soldiers took the truth away with them." And, in 1947, what did they do to Madagascar? Even having been promised independence for fighting in the French army, the Fahavalos rebelled against the colonial system. The repression was fierce. Fahavalo / Fahavalo, Madagascar 1947 (2018, Madagascar, 19335) is the title of Marie Clémence Andriamonta-Paes's documentary, in which she seeks out the last survivors and witnesses of these massacres and allows their words to break away from the silence that was imposed upon them. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."2 We must thus learn from the past in order to move forward, as the search for the self happens through a process of anchoring and of hybridity. This paradox is what nourishes those films that interlay personal history with that of the collective, thus the production of such a significant number of works involving remembrance and memory. They undertake a work of memory that nevertheless resonates in the present. Filmmakers' childhood memories provide the basis for films of great sensitivity, ridding them of political hatred in order to highlight relationships of proximity like those of Mohamed Amin Benamraoui in Adios Carmen (2013, Morocco, 15796) or of Mehdi Charef in Cartouches gauloises / Summer of '62 (2007, Algeria, 1981). These are stories of the tears in the fabric of human life; despite the violence and hierarchies of the colonial relationship, bonds were formed that encouraged the confrontation of history—devoid of myth and of the unspoken. Contemporary history is also called upon to contemplate the self. Many films have been created about Itsembabwoko, the Rwandan genocide. In the most recent of these, Miséricorde de la jungle / Mercy of the Jungle (2018, Rwanda, 16044), directed by Joël Karekezi, two soldiers must help each other to survive in the jungle, fleeing the madness of war and their own demons. The confrontation with the savagery of nature, as well as the evolution of the relationship between the two men, prove to be initiatory. They grow together in conscience and in depth of spirit. The audience finds themselves immersed alongside these two men in a sensory experience—that of...