Part of the series Representing African Film: Criteria for African film selection at Dutch film festivals.

Before we can understand how film festival represent African film in the Netherlands, we must first understand what African film constitutes. How did film develop in Africa? What have been filmmakers' motivations? How is African film understood today? And, importantly, what is the role of film festivals herein?

Excerpts from Zohra, produced by the Tunisian Albert Samama. Released in 1922, Zohra is considered one of the first African films (Harrow, 2017). It tells the story of a shipwrecked French woman who resides with an indigenous North African community. Eventually she is repatriated by a Frenchman.

An example of a colonial African film. Here is the Gold Coast, was released in 1947 by the British Central Office of Information. The film details and justifies the colonial development program for the Gold Coast (present day Ghana). Source

Film was introduced in Africa by the Lumière brothers in 1896. The medium was quickly adopted to serve the colonial enterprise to supposedly educate Africans into civilised and obedient subjects. Simultaneously it served to entertain and inform settlers and metropole audiences (Thackway, 2014; Harrow, 2017). Didactic films would remain a trend in African cinema. After independence, one-party states still employed film to advocate their causes and promote nationalist sentiments. Filmmakers’ “political commitment was based on the perception that cinema, like literature, must be a tool for social transformation" (Tcheuyap, 2018, p. 202). Independently, filmmakers were preoccupied with constructing their own image of Africa, restoring African cultural pride along the way (Thackway, 2014). Interestingly, such movies did not always appeal to African audiences, who like audiences elsewhere, sought entertainment rather than pedagogy (Tcheuyap, 2018).

Trailer for Afrique Sur Seine (1955). Although set and shot in Paris, the movie was among the first made by an African production team, including director Paulin Soumanou Vierya  (Harrow, 2017). The film follows African students in the French capital.

Popular African cinema emerged in the late eighties in West Africa (Dovey, 2015). Filmmakers slowly moved away from nationalist political engagement and purely ‘African stories’. Entertaining movies with universal themes were able to attract larger African audiences (Tcheuyap, 2018). Pioneer of this new approach, Idrissa Ouedraogo, noted the need to move beyond the idea of African cinema. To him, a film should be the director’s authentic work, and not determined by a set of rules that supposedly make it African (Tcheuyap, 2018).

Places like Nollywood now produce ‘purely entertaining’ content at unprecedented scales. While some deem popular African cinema a qualitative downgrade, others counter that argument as elitist (Dovey, 2013). The two trailers shown below, Nimbe (2019) and The Big Fat Lie (2020), give a clue as to the diversity existing within Nollywood alone.

The political aspect of filmmaking has not been completely abandoned. Take for example the Ethiopian-American director Rasselas Lakew. Answering whether or not he considered himself an African filmmaker, he replied in the affirmative adding that “Perhaps I am not a filmmaker at all but a politician” (as quoted in Dovey, 2013, p. 109). Lakew also alluded to a new higher cause for African film: countering afro-pessimism through positive images of the continent. Within the Ethiopian context, he argued, this is the only thing audiences want to see (Dovey, 2013). Thackway (2014) observed a similar desire or need to represent African people truthfully, among African francophone filmmakers, stationed in Europe. While abandoning the stylised nationalism of early post-independence filmmaking, these directors still pursue a politically and socially critical essence. Rather than a directly didactic approach, this new generation encourages (African) audiences to be reflective.

In The Athlete (2009), Rasselas Lakew tried to present a positive film about Africa, through celebrating the famous Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila (Dovey, 2010).

Baamum Nafi, set to be released in 2021, was one of the films shown at the Leiden International Film Festival, 2021. According to curator Elvire Eijkman, the film contains a strong element of sociopolitical critique. Importantly, this is only one aspect of the film, which can be seen more as a warning then an attempt at educating audiences (personal communication, November 16, 2020).

All images in this blog are lisenced as creative commons.