Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers at the World’s Most Prestigious Film Festival

Abstract

Film festivals’ whirlwind curatorial tours of the globe in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century beg an important question: where are the great sub-Saharan African filmmakers who began their work in the early 1960s? Several films, made with some African participation, were featured in 1950s film festivals. For example, The Boy Kumasenu (1952), produced through the Colonial Film Unit of Ghana and shown at the Berlin Film Festival, won a diplomat at the Venice Film Festival (Garritano 2013: 33). The 1961 Berlin Film Festival screened and awarded two Senegalese films: Grand Magai a Touba (dir. Blaise Senghor, 1960), which received the Silver Bear for the best short film, and Une Nation est nee (dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr, 1961), which received a special mention (Bangre 1994). Ousmane Sembenes Borom Sarret (1963) won first prize at the Tours Film Festival in France. The only African director truly and consistently venerated on the international film festival circuit from the 1950s to the 1990s, however, was the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine (1926–2008). Chahine began his career at Cannes in the 1950s (De Valck 2007: 94); was featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in the 1970s (Wong 2011: 24); was the subject of major retrospectives by the Locarno Film Festival (in 1996) and the New York Film Festival (in 1998); and won the first Lifetime Achievement Award at Cannes in 1997 (Wong 2011: 47).1 For African filmmakers other than Chahine—even the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Sembene, the so-called “Father of African Cinema”—international festival recognition was far more sporadic.