Is African cin­e­ma on the rise?

At a recent event on African film in Par­lia­ment, David Som­er­set, cura­tor at the British Film Insti­tute, said he encoun­tered huge dif­fi­cul­ties sourc­ing film and archive footage from Africa; hard­ly sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing that for cen­turies West­ern­ers have been the ones hold­ing the cam­era, telling Africa’s sto­ry. As Som­er­set puts it, ​“Africa doesn’t own its his­to­ry, its archives.” Yet today Africans are more in con­trol of their own nar­ra­tives than ever before, and the film world is tak­ing note – in May, the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val select­ed its first ever Ethiopi­an and Ivo­rian films, while an African has become the first ever non-Euro­pean to curate the Venice Biennale.

Fur­ther evi­dence of this cul­tur­al explo­sion can be found at the annu­al Film Africa fes­ti­val, which show­cas­es con­tem­po­rary film tal­ent from the con­ti­nent. The ​“Oth­er­ing” of African sub­jects is the ambi­tious theme of Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Rwan­dan film, Things of the Aim­less Wan­der­er. ​‘Mzun­gu’ (‘they who wan­der aim­less­ly’) is what East Africans have been call­ing Euro­peans since the 18^th cen­tu­ry, when they first encoun­tered their per­ni­cious explo­rations into their lands. Ruhorahoza’s fea­ture crit­i­cis­es the for­eign cor­re­spon­dent – sym­bol­ised by a strik­ing­ly Aryan man, who nar­rates with supe­ri­or­i­ty and con­de­scen­sion his judge­ments of the peo­ple of a remote African town. The oppo­site sym­bol is that of the black man, vio­lent­ly resist­ing this outsider’s monop­oly on opin­ion, a coloni­sa­tion by words which threat­ens his world. Their rival­ry is played out not in its own right, but over a female body (“So often, the female body is a battlefield”).

Ruho­ra­hoza insists the film is not fem­i­nist, (“It’s not my place to make a fem­i­nist film,” he tells LWLies) and cer­tain­ly it is not straight­for­ward­ly so. It is a film about pos­ses­sion of the colonis­er over the colonised – exer­cised through brute force and the less vis­i­ble dis­ci­pli­nary sys­tems of inter­na­tion­al media. It is about the sud­den and vio­lent tran­si­tion from tra­di­tion to moder­ni­ty, reflect­ing the botched exit from Rwan­da by the Bel­gians. We do not know what hap­pens to the woman, who dis­ap­pears after an encounter with the jour­nal­ist. Dif­fer­ent hypothe­ses to her dis­ap­pear­ance, based on real events in Kigali, are explored in a jagged nar­ra­tive patch­work which is bathed in a mes­meris­ing soundscape.

The only char­ac­ter endowed with nar­ra­tive pow­er is the jour­nal­ist, and his inner voice has the last word. But the film ends with a flash: the black man aims a cam­era at the view­er, turn­ing the tables on us. We are now the sub­jects. Ruho­ra­hoza empha­sis­es the dif­fi­cul­ty of get­ting his film seen in Rwan­da. Rwanda’s cin­e­mas only show pop­u­lar block­busters and Bol­ly­wood films, and the taste for art­house films is not yet there. Of the ​‘African film ris­ing’ nar­ra­tive, he says: ​“I don’t think we can talk about African film ris­ing there’s no over­ar­ch­ing move­ment or insti­tu­tion back­ing this. It is rather indi­vid­ual African film­mak­ers who are ris­ing, by hustling.”

Philippe Lacôte’s Run, which fol­lows its epony­mous pro­tag­o­nist as he attempts to escape his sur­round­ings, seems direct­ed entire­ly by chance. ​“Not exact­ly,” Lacôte tells LWLies. ​“Run is a young man who doesn’t com­plete­ly choose what hap­pens to him. This may seem strange here in Europe where every­one has the feel­ing of being in con­trol of their lives, but it is a real­i­ty for many of the youth in my coun­try.”
The film opens with Run shoot­ing the Pres­i­dent. He earns his name being buf­fet­ed from place to place in a chaot­ic and lone­ly sub­sti­tute for an upbring­ing. Acci­den­tal­ly join­ing the Young Patri­ots, a mili­tia-cum-gang, he is drawn into the cen­tre of a polit­i­cal whirlpool, which brings him to the edge of death and then back to where we start­ed – the assassination.

Lacôte is French-Ivo­rian, and Run cap­tures the upheaval in his Cote d’Ivoire between 2011 and 2012. The coun­try was rocked by polit­i­cal vio­lence after Lau­rent Gbagbo’s elec­tion win was thrown into doubt. Xeno­pho­bic killings were the out­come of long-bub­bling ten­sion and labelling of out­siders under the guise of a nation­al­ist con­cept of ivoir­ité – Ivo­rian­ness. Politi­cians instru­men­talised ivoir­ité to exclude polit­i­cal ene­mies based on their ances­try – a futile attempt at delin­eat­ing clear iden­ti­ties in the Ivo­rian melt­ing-pot of cen­turies-long region­al migra­tion flows.

Film­ing so soon after the con­flict, Gbag­bo mil­i­tants accused Lacôte of cre­at­ing divi­sions. His char­ac­ters are drawn from real life, mak­ing them sit uneasi­ly with Ivo­rians recov­er­ing from this wave of divi­sive vio­lence. Despite this, Run has been well received in Cote d’Ivoire. On it being select­ed as the first ever Ivo­rian film to screen at Cannes, Lacôte says he hopes it was because the film is beautiful.

Good doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing eras­es the direc­tor entire­ly, putting those in front of the cam­era first. They Will Have to Kill Us First gives the voice of Malian musi­cians in exile cen­tre stage. The film focus­es on Song­hoy Blues, a band who owe their exis­tence to their meet­ing in a refugee camp after flee­ing the jihadist takeover of a north­ern Mali area larg­er than the UK and France. The jihadists banned music, unwit­ting­ly gift­ing Malian musi­cians the ulti­mate protest weapon.

The prob­lem of enter­tain­ing while inform­ing and cam­paign­ing is a peren­ni­al one. ​“One of the beau­ties of telling this sto­ry through the musi­cians and the indus­try,” Schwartz says, ​“is that it’s a tan­gi­ble win­dow through which you can open up a com­plex, hor­rif­ic issue.” Her film will be screened in Mali once she is sure the musi­cians’ safe­ty will not be jeop­ar­dised as a result.

There’s a pres­sure to be the stan­dard-bear­er for a whole coun­try when you’ve made the first-ever Ethiopi­an film to be select­ed for Cannes. Yared Zeleke says he didn’t feel this pres­sure, but hoped to tell a sto­ry from his per­spec­tive. Zeleke had to flee Ethiopia as a child dur­ing the Ethiopi­an-Eritre­an war, and his film, Lamb, tells of a young boy deal­ing with los­ing and being lost after a drought forces his father to send him to live with dis­tant rel­a­tives. Ephraim’s clos­est friend in this upheaval is his lamb Chu­ni, whom he must kill at the Feast of the Holy Cross in order to become a man. Tsion, his rebel­lious cousin, helps him resist the family’s attempts to kill his best friend.

“Tsion, the girl, is my hope for the future,” says Zeleke, empha­sis­ing how shy girls are taught to be in his home coun­try, and what a rare ener­gy he saw in 16-year-old Kidist Siyum who plays her. She and Redi­at Amare, the 14-year-old who plays Ephraim, left Ethiopia for the first time to attend the Cannes screen­ing ear­li­er this year – one of the more extreme ways to be intro­duced to Europe.

The film is a love let­ter to Ethiopia, its rich pur­ple and green cloths and ancient gas­tron­o­my. Lamb is in Amhar­ic. ​“No one there speaks in Euro­pean lan­guages,” says Zeleke. ​“It could nev­er be in a Euro­pean lan­guage. Peri­od.” Glob­al audi­ences are increas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing the stereo­type that they’re loath to watch films in for­eign lan­guages, and African direc­tors should take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case their sto­ries in the lan­guage they’re lived in. Reaf­firm­ing African lan­guages is an impor­tant step in the decoloni­sa­tion of the mov­ing image.

It may be true to say that these works rep­re­sent the breadth of tal­ent emerg­ing from Africa, but they must not be pigeon­holed as belong­ing sole­ly to the con­ti­nent; they are universal.

The Roy­al African Society’s Film Africa Fes­ti­val runs 30 Octo­ber to 8 Novem­ber across Lon­don. For more info vis­it fil​mafrica​.org​.uk