African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”

Abstract

African Film Festivals in Africa:Curating "African Audiences" for "African Films" Lindiwe Dovey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure B. An audience member overlooks the FESPACO ceremony. Courtesy of FESPACO. [End Page 12] The First Film Festivals in Africa: "Educating" the "African Audience" No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg.1 If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals.2 Although certain prestigious film festivals (Cannes, in particular) operate mostly as closed, industry events focused on the glamor and business of filmmaking, most of the thousands of film festivals around the world see their main beneficiaries as both filmmakers and audiences.3 In fact, "the curator Neil Young has questioned whether Cannes, which excludes the public from most of its screenings, qualifies as a festival at all" on this basis.4 As a field of study, film festivals offer an ideal opportunity to observe films playing out in public contexts, with live audiences and discussions. The contested meanings of films in these settings challenge the dominant hermeneutic practice of close film analysis as it takes place in professional settings, such as universities and newspapers, where the contexts of a film's screening are rarely taken into account in the critic's judgement of the film. There is particular potential for research on the (dis)sensus communis surrounding African-made films in this respect, given that festivals are among the few public arenas in which such films are screened. Along with the exhibition of Nollywood movies at thousands of video halls across the continent, festivals are among the public spaces awaiting more in-depth research.5 Although there are exceptions, the organizers of many film festivals in Africa put great emphasis on the central value of audiences to their festivals' worth and meaning. As I will show, many Africans have been motivated to found and run their festivals by the structural and institutional barriers to a certain kind of film being accessible to Africa-based audiences, and many curators of these festivals find ways of actually incorporating audience perspectives into their curatorial principles. The kinds of spectators [End Page 13] cultivated by many African curators are a world away from what Shweta Kishore, for example, describes of audience experiences at the first Ladakh International Film Festival in India in 2012: Audiences were restricted to the established position of "viewer," which allowed the consumption of film but excluded contributions to structural aspects of the festival. Opportunities for intervention, such as post-film discussions, interactions with filmmakers, and festival structures that included audience feedback were missing—especially significant given that LIFF was the first film festival in the entire region.6 As Witz explains, if no audience spontaneity is fostered by a festival, there will be little chance of festive excitement. Rather, the festival will assume a unidirectional pedagogical tone. As will become evident in the next few chapters of this book, where film festival directors and curators within Africa have not incorporated audience tastes and desires into their conceptualization of their festivals, audiences have frequently stepped up to claim this power and sense of authorship and ownership over the festivals. It is thus not only the festival organizers who determine whether a festival's culture is participatory or not. As Karin Barber's foundational work on popular culture and audiences in Africa has shown, there are especially porous boundaries between production and reception in many African contexts.7 Ways of thinking about audiences in Africa have come a long way since colonial times. A significant body of scholarship on the practices of colonial film units and missionaries who used film in Africa has revealed the extent to which "the African audience" was constructed by such groups as a homogenous and non-individuated mass to be feared and policed.8 While they did not call themselves film festivals, the mobile film screenings held in different parts of the continent by film units and missionaries from the early 1900s onwards satisfy my definition of a film festival, in that they brought together huge, live audiences at specific...