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

Abstract

No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg (1999: 8–9). If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals.1 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 (see Peranson 2013: 193–196). 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 (Archibald and Miller 2011: 250). 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 critics judgment 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.2