FESPACO 2021: Feature Films, a Return to the Future

Abstract

What thematic and aesthetic trends can be discerned in the feature-length fiction films presented in competition and in some of the other selections of FESPACO 2021? As always, the films take a close interest in social realities, but the marked documentary dimension of most of them responds to current African emergencies: both alerting people to these realities and helping those who are confronted with them to live through them, which also means assuming them by accepting uncertainty. The films are therefore inscribed in the present rather than tending towards a utopia. But in order not to despair, they try to document the courage to write the possible. This implies thinking of oneself as one's own center, without having to justify oneself anymore. To feel the strength of the resistance in everyday life is the real stake of the memory. It is the History of brown bodies, where one relies only on oneself, whose stake is emancipation. Faced with fundamentalism, the filmmakers are wary of beliefs. They dethrone the heroes and prefer the fantastic, the farce, or the poetry. It is to say how much they believe in the cinema to imagine the ways of the revival.