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Abstract: With this timely and robust issue, we mark fifteen successful years of publication, constituting thirty original issues of Black Camera.Unlike other scholarly film journals, readers long acquainted with Black Camera observe that the format and organization of nearly every issue features distinctive portfolios: "Close-Ups," "Dossiers," and "Documents" devoted to the in-depth study of filmmaking in Africa and its diasporas worldwide.Indeed, for reference and study, it merits citing here the frequency and diversity of Close-Ups published to date:•Nothing But a Man—Spring 2012•Precious—Winter 2012•Teza—Spring 2013•Afrosurrealism—Fall 2013•Nollywood—A Worldly Creative Practice—Spring 2014•Postcolonial Filmmaking ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In light of the international protests of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, Tyre Nichols in 2023, the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the continued violent and unjust antagonisms between law enforcement and Black communities in the United States, we feel it necessary to revisit Black films made in the 1970s. The term "Blaxploitation" is considered an umbrella term, grouping all Black films made in the 1970s under one rubric, despite their breadth of genres. Questions of auteurship, black dramatic agency, and participants' control over their careers within a notoriously segregated film industry need to be addressed in scholarship, especially regarding the adaptation of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up on the late Afrocuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. A staunch revolutionary and a firm believer in the role of art in shaping a new Cuba, Gómez was committed to making film (and revolution more generally) that at once celebrated and critiqued the revolutionary process; that documented the revolution's unfolding and contributed to its formation. Gómez was one of only three Black filmmakers—and the only woman filmmaker—working in the Instituto Cubana del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. This frequently cited biographical note points in many ways to the limits of the Revolution's commitments to race and gender struggle ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up focused on the 1972 film Sambizanga, by the French filmmaker of Caribbean descent, Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020).Sambizanga centers the experience of a young Angolan mother, Maria, as she searches for her husband Domingos after he is kidnapped by colonial police, and in the process pictures the underground movement for Angolan independence a decade before the film's production. Adapted from José Luandino Vieira's novella The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (1961), Sambizanga has been described as the first feature film directed by a Black woman. Utilizing non-professional actors, Maldoror's film mixes the personal narrative of Maria and her husband with explicitly ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "Cast away illusions and prepare for struggle!"2Somewhere between historical document and radical pedagogy, Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) has inspired audiences on the Left for generations, persistently raising the importance and interrelation of working-class politics and Black liberation to social transformation. Few films within the canon of radical documentary share the stature and lasting impact of Finally Got the News (FGtN).Set in the industrial furnace of Detroit at the peak of a worldwide rebellion, FGtN purveyed and expressed the militant spirit animating the long 1960s of labor militancy and Black radicalism. The Detroit Rebellion, a five-day citywide ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Then came this battle called Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending in the presidential election of 1876—twenty awful years.The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back toward slavery."UAW" means "You ain't white!"On July 23, 1967, a violent police raid on an after-hours Black bar incited what is now known as the Detroit Rebellion, the largest of the more than 150 riots and urban insurrections that swept the United States during the Long Hot Summer of that year. Less than nine months later, following the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a second riot shook Detroit, accompanied by uprisings in over one hundred other cities. The murder of King, easily the most ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In his thought-provoking book The Death of Cinema, Paolo Cherchi Usai shows that what used to be the leading method of film studies—"film as text" and "textual analysis"—implied nothing but an ahistorical abstraction due to the establishing of "the model image" as its point of departure.2 As Cherchi Usai famously puts it: "If all moving images could be experienced as a model image (that is, in their intended state, in an intention visible in every part of them even before their actual consumption), no such thing as film history would be needed or possible."3Cherchi Usai's anecdotal and aphoristic book has often been read as a metaphysical and melancholic intervention from someone mourning the slow disappearance of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: At a 2022 screening of the documentary Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970), dissident and activist Donald Abdul Roberts described his first encounter with the striking workers of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit during the fall of 1968. "I was reading about the drums and I heard the drums," Donald Abdul recalled, explaining that he was riding the bus and reading C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins when he first encountered the DRUM workers on strike.1 Elaborating further in an interview with Mohammed Elnaiem in 2020, Donald Abdul recalled riding the Chene Street bus past the Dodge Main assembly plant in Hamtramck: "On the bus, I'm reading a part ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For many of its initial viewers, Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) gave food for thought on the contemporary world, particularly to those who had paid little or no attention to the tens of millions of unwaged and waged workers of non-European origins who have toiled for capitalism in the modern era worldwide, including in the United States.The film maintains a remarkable historical depth of field as it introduces viewers to contemporary industrial conditions through a historical perspective on antebellum African American slavery and persistent discrimination since the Civil War. The film narrative opens onto the plight of African Americans in Detroit in the early 1960s ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Though not directly affiliated with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Dan Georgakas served a crucial role in documenting the struggles of the League, most notably in the now classic coauthored study Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. It is by way of Georgakas's and coauthor Marvin Surkin's study that many contemporary activists have come to learn of the League's precedence in "urban revolution," to borrow from the book's subtitle. Alongside the League's militant workplace organizing, wildcat strikes, and legal battles, Georgakas and Surkin pay special attention to the League's manifold practices of cultural production—from the League-affiliated newspaper Inner City Voice, edited by John Watson, and the various ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: John Watson, one of the founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and member of the executive committee of the Central Staff, was in Europe this summer [1970] to present a documentary on the struggles led by the League in American factories. The interview that we publish—conducted by Dan Georgakas last September [1969] in Florence—is the first official exposition of his fundamental ideas, specifically addressed to the European public.If you would like to receive materials published by the League and the Inner City Voice, you can contact:Black Star Publications, 8842 Fenkell, Detroit, Michigan 48238, USA.Why does the League define itself as Marxist-Leninist'We consider ourselves Marxist-Leninists because ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The interviews selected and gathered in the following were conducted by Chris Robé in the process of doing research for his book Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas (2017).1 There, Robé charts a decades-long trajectory of radical and autonomous video making, emerging in the various upstarts and dissolutions of New Left organizations around the world, continuing through and against the global ascendancy of neoliberal structural adjustment, and culminating in a variety of twenty-first-century digital activisms that contend with a dramatically transformed political, cultural, technological, and economic landscape. The coherence of such a trajectory in the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Historical scholarship on Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) has prioritized the production of the film, in large part at the cost of its circulation as a filmic text and political manifesto. No doubt, there is much contemporary merit to parsing the complicated process of producing Finally Got the News (FGtN) and the manifold social contradictions that pervaded its production and inform its signifying registers. Various accounts of the film's production illuminate crucial questions around the political utility of filmmaking within the context of shopfloor organizing, strategic questions that preoccupied and invited much consternation among many of the leaders of the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the long and fraught history of representation, FESPACO's defining mission is to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diaspora of peoples, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and, in the project of world making, the futurity of the Black world.1These words aptly frame the objectives of this Close-Up: to recover, to chronicle, to affirm, to reimagine even, African/Diasporan women's cinematic world-making, indeed self-making—envisioning the manners in which they devise, create, make, a space, a universe, a domain, a world; within which they may tell/relate their stories—storytelling ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It makes more sense to begin [a discussion/exhibition/paper/retrospective on Blacks & Cinema] with the 1890s when we were both on the screen and in the auditorium too, and thinking. … But let's not begin in the 1890s. Let's begin in the beginning of our experiments with cinema. That would be the Nile …Perhaps, as an African American, Toni Cade Bambara was inspired by the visual imaginaire of Langston Hughes's poem:I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and olderthan the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.I looked upon the Nile and raised the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The transAfrican nature of women's cinematic practice, embodying border-crossings, transnational exchanges, interdisciplinary movements, represents a form of collective intellectual and cultural capital, inscribed by intersectional theory-praxis-based discourse: activist, academic, creative, sociopolitical. Hence the notion of a transAfrican aesthetic evolves from the Africa/diaspora reciprocity of artistic, cultural, and political consciousness. The term "transAfrican" emerged in the 1960s to describe an African diaspora imaginary;1 however, the tradition of African/diasporan interconnections has earlier roots, evolving from the exchange and flow of political and cultural discourse among African Americans ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Within the discursive spaces of the cinematic landscape, find the cultural workers—independent producers, curators, archivists, organizers, media activists, scholars and the many other stakeholders—who have as purpose, to build a legacy, to amass collective intellectual and cultural capital, by creating, archiving, disseminating, curating, preserving, teaching the shared cinematic experiences of the Africas/Diasporas, as well as to uphold the oral traditions through moving image storytelling. And in a rephrasing of the adage of Amadou Hampâté Bâ: when an elder dies, it is as if a film library has burned down—these daring women, custodians of culture, endeavor to ensure that it will not be lost, that it will ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: African women's voices are alternative discourse, affirms Anne-Laure Folly Reimann of Togo. Hence, this conceptual framework that recenters African women's voices, describes a woman-focused standpoint epistemology reflecting both African women's lived experiences and African ways of viewing the world. "I think that we are a bit lost in our international discourse to the extent that we no longer exist. Now we must say something," she insists.1The tenets of an intersectional, alternative discourse expressed by African women reflects this desire to "say something," to contribute to the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge by going beyond the accepted standards, the familiar views and references—on race, gender ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This section serves to examine the manners of mediating diasporic cinematic experiences and practice across generations and geographies. In women's storytelling of their individual experiences in mediating positionality, subjectivity, social location within the diasporas in which they journey to study, create, share knowledge, and to find a home, one may find intersecting themes, of transnational subjectivities, cinematic identities, collective and negotiated memories. These stories reveal the cinematic imaginary of African women who have voyaged from Africa to study or teach, of the cinematic journeys of identity of those who have migrated to another country, of first-generation African women who were born or were ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Navigating the international cinema landscape, Paris-based journalist Falila Gbadamassi has a visible presence in francophone African and Diaspora medias, with a specific focus on cinema and culture. She encounters internationally acclaimed filmmakers, organizers, other film critics, programmers, curators, organizers and indeed, film activists. Their journeys are as diverse as their identities and personal histories. They have specific experiences as it relates to their diasporan positionality between Europe/the West and Africa. How do these positionalities and their multiple identities inform their films, their "ways of seeing," their critical inquiry' In this section, she and the women in conversation with ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Since its beginnings in the 1960s, there has been an evolution in African Cinema Studies discourse as well as its relationship with the diaspora—and in particular, the signification of diaspora as a concept, idea, and place. At the same time, "African" itself has become an increasingly contested identity. Hence, in my work on African women in cinema, I have navigated these evolving subjectivities: women of African parents living in the African diasporas, now film professionals asserting their agency, defining on their own terms their relationship with Africa and their birth/host country, even the notion of home and homeland; the emergence of a visible presence of women of non-African ethnicities, born or ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: African-descendant women take control of their image. Deconstructing stereotyped, exoticized representations, reconstructing their own image outside of the hegemonic frame. And in so doing offer realistic paradigms for seeing, alternative manners of looking. Through a selection of collages, this gallery highlights several themes explored in the Close-Up with visual assemblages of many of the women featured therein.Diverting the colonial gaze, subverting—even mocking it, Josephine Baker reinvents her persona—1925. Almost one hundred years later, she enters the Pantheon of France (fig. 1).A collage of images around the pantheonization of Josephine Baker. The ceremony on November 30, 2021, in Paris, projects on giant ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Paying honor where honor is due, the Golden Stallion of Yennenga Award was attributed to the intriguing Ashkal, by Tunisian director Youssef Chebbi. An inspector from the pro-Ben Ali police's inner circle, and a young female inspector who sees things differently, are put in charge of investigating a mysterious immolation in the abandoned construction site of the Carthage Gardens neighborhood, a real estate project destined for rich Tunisians under Ben Ali, interrupted by the revolution. The mystery grows as ever more immolations occur, and the opposition between the two inspectors crystallizes around their connections and methods.Ashkal means "forms" in Arabic. A stunning dialectic plays out in this film shot in ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Through the publishing agreement with IU Press and a three-year collaboration with FESPACO and IMAGINE Film Institute in Burkina Faso, the Black Camera staff is proud to highlight the publication in 2023 of African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization, a three-part book collection exploring the history, theory, and practice of African and Black Diasporic cinema. Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers an unmatched overview and resource of black film for researchers, teachers, and the public.Each volume features a distinct focus: Volume One elaborates the colonial antecedents ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: At the intersection of Pan-Africanism as an organizing construct and practice in world affairs, Négritude, unmasking colonial referents, and cinema, counter-historical mode of cultural production, find June Givanni at the epicenter of all manner of artistic activity. Indeed, like the recently deceased Okwui Enwezor for African art, Givanni merits the distinction of curator extraordinaire for African and black diaspora cinema. Interlocutor, writer, and founding director of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA), for her accomplishments she received an honorary doctorate in 2018 from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Respected and admired by cineaste, filmmaker ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mariama Hima's experience with cinema begins in the early 1960s as a teenage ciné-club buff. She was the only girl, as if a prelude to her cinematic journey and professional career, where often times as the only woman, she would continue to blaze the trail. Her connection with Jean Rouch as translator and editor of several of his films, would concretize her desire for filmmaking. During the Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference, held in London in 1995, she outlines her cinematic journey and the challenges and triumphs throughout. She begins her conversation as a respondent to Teshome Gabriel's presentation titled "The Intolerable Gift," during which he describes his return to Ethiopia after a ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Aissatou Bah Diallo, in the 1991 May issue of Amina Magazine, summed up Chantal Bagilishya's trajectory in this way:1Chantal Bagilishya is the only African woman in the Francophone world to gravitate to the area of producer: "it's a nightmare, you have to be a bit crazy to work in this very volatile métier." After the political events that shook Rwanda in 1959–60, Chantal and the entire Bagilishya family followed the first wave of Tutsi immigration. She lived in Zaire for five years, followed by two years in Burundi before uniting with her doctor father, her mother, and seven brothers and sisters in Bordeaux in 1968. After secondary education, she studied journalism in Bordeaux with the famous writer and journalist ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: D. Elmina Davis who recently died of malaria in Ghana, was a member of Ceddo Film & Video, a Black Independent cinema group of the 1980s. Sister D., as she was popularly known, brought to Ceddo and the Black workshop movement as a whole, a strong awareness of the needs and perceptions of young Black people in London. She had first-hand experience of working with youth and community groups where video was becoming an important instrument of self-expression. In 1986, Ceddo produced The People's Account (dir. Milton Bryan, United Kingdom), which brought Sister D.'s skills and her solid community links together to significant and controversial effect. This production documents the events leading up to the 1985 ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: M'Bissine Thérèse Diop of Senegal is best known for her pioneering role in the iconic film, La Noire de … (1966, France and Senegal) by Ousmane Sembène. In her only other part in an African film, Sembène's Emitai (Senegal, France), released in 1971, she features among a cohort of women in quiet resistance. While her presence in African cinema is relatively small, her role as Diouana in La Noire de … looms large and has ensured her place in the annals of African film history, perhaps more specifically because of the historical importance of the film. During Carrie Dailey's interview with Sembène in 1971 that she conducted for her dissertation research, he talks about the actual events that evolved into the short ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: … [Alienation] is not only the expression of my subjective state but an act of defiance on my part. It was the awareness of my own alienation which brought me to african studies … in my own search for authenticity, i wanted to know Africans and Africa.1Carrie Dailey2 indeed holds a pivotal place in African Women in Cinema Studies discourse and the transAfrican counter-hegemonic production of knowledge. The text that introduces her doctoral dissertation, at the intersection of the personal and political, foregrounds her journey into a cinematic inquiry that would set her on a path to self-discovery as well as an intellectual awakening. As she states in her presentation, it is about that period in the 1960s which ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: A Portrait of Safi Faye. Photo courtesy of the author.Safi Faye, an exemplar transnational woman of the moving image, throughout her career as ethnologist-filmmaker focused her camera on the untold manifestations of African emigration, and in particular on the lives and experiences of people in the back-and-forth movement resulting from rural exodus, on people in the flow of diasporic existence, identities, subjectivities. In so doing, she reconciled the contradictions of her Senegalese-French identity through the study and research of her rural-dwelling people—her purpose, to give them voice. She emphasized the fact that because of the imposition of the French language, history, and culture, she knew little about ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Visionary Annette Mbaye d'Erneville, veteran journalist, communications specialist, media activist, critic and writer, pioneer of Senegalese media culture. Born in the Sokone region of Senegal in 1926, she initially studied to be a teacher, at the time a prestigious profession predestined for the women elites of her generation. She then went to Paris in 1947 on a scholarship. She would later plunge into the intellectual life of the 1950s, becoming actively involved in the events of the African pre-Independence movements. Her entrance into the inaugural class of the studio-school of the Radio Broadcasting Company of Overseas France in 1953, would be a career-defining decision that set her on her life's journey; she ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: If you are doing research, you must look at my work, and if you have not then that means that you have not done your research properly… . Not because of the joy of reading it, but to know what has been there, that it has been done and how it all started … that is why it is very relevant for today.1This section highlights the scholarship and experiences of Dr. Joy Nwosu Lo-Bamijoko during the 1960s when she studied and worked in Italy, related in the seminal interview by Leonardo De Franceschi conducted in 2014, originally published on the Cineafrica.org website, which he founded. While obscure and little known, hers is a pioneering work, and every opportunity I get to highlight women trailblazers in African cinema ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The first African film that I saw not only influenced me but also haunted me. It was La Noire de … by Ousmane Sembène. I saw this film in the West Indies when I was very young. I had not yet left to study in Paris. I shall never forget that film. I had never set foot in France and I had a certain impression of the French, it was upsetting, oh lá lá, the music, it still sends shivers down my spine!1I never questioned my color or my gender while doing my work, because when I … decided I wanted to do it, I must have been between ten and twelve years old. It was when I arrived in Paris to study at the Sorbonne, with my dreams and my desires, that I realized that I am black and a woman. These were things that were ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The documentary is above all an irreplaceable school.Izza Genini was born in Morocco, but she has lived in France since 1960. She has made Maroc corps et âme / Morocco Body and Soul (1992, Morocco), a series of short documentaries on music. Genini talks about the development of her work and her personal itinerary of rediscovery of the culture of her origins.How did you get involved in distribution and then production'Since my first experience in cinema up until the present, a little by chance at first, then by choice, I have always been in the world of cinema. Initially I was in charge of a private screening space called Club 70 and two festivals in Tours and in Annecy. Then, when my personal journey brought me ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Françoise, you have multiple identities and ties to three continents! Please talk about how this all began.I was born in France of Guadeloupean and Alsatian parentage. I was destined to cross continents and countries because of my origins. My father, who was from Guadeloupe, enrolled in the military—which enabled him to go up the social ladder—and retired at the rank of lieutenant. This was pretty good for a colonized person, since at the time Guadeloupe was a colony and not a département. My mother, who was born in Alsace, was a beautician and owned a hair salon in Paris. Alsace is at the eastern border of France between France and Germany, so it is interesting how my father came from Guadeloupe, from the West and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: African women frequently travel outside of their home nations for a variety of reasons, which include education, business, to join a spouse, explore new prospects, to go and have a baby delivered, for pleasure, or employment. As an aspiring academic, I traveled to further my education for career advancement and contribute to knowledge in a field I was yet to identify. For many African students, studying abroad comes with its own challenges and opportunities. While this mixed-bag experience could include culture shock, financial burden, a language barrier, perceived racism, feelings of loneliness, and homesickness, it presents opportunities to study in an international context, experience a foreign country and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: During my long international career, particularly within the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), as the person overseeing the cinema section for African countries for nearly twenty-five years, I have been able to give new impetus to the empowerment and diversification of partners while bringing a modernized version of the pan African aspect in the numerous activities vis-à-vis the development of the 7th Art on the continent.1Souad Houssein (France/Djibouti) is the Founder of the Pan-African Audiovisual and Cinema Observatory (OPAC), whose objective is to collect data on the economic impact of the cinema and audiovisual industry in Africa. Holder of a master's degree in global communication and a ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mahen, you are Executive Director of African Film Festival, Inc., an important institution that you established and which has steadily grown, since 1990. Could you tell us about Mahen Bonetti'I am a Sierra Leonean who has lived in the United States for the past twenty-five years. I reside in New York with my husband and daughter. After completing my studies, I worked in advertising and later for Weekly News Magazine. I developed more of an interest in the arts when I met my then-future husband, Luca, who is now my present husband and hopefully my last (laughter). He is an arts conservator. As a result of this union, naturally I became aware of and interested in African art and culture. Basically, you take things ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: You came on the cinema scene in 1992 and have made several films since then. Could you talk about your evolution into cinema'I am not really a filmmaker; in conventional terms I mean. I began several years ago. I am an international lawyer. I was sent on a mission to my country. I was very happy to get a chance to see my grandmother. She died when I was there, and I attended the funeral. I observed the treatment of the dead, their relationship with the cosmos and the world, and their basic values.It occurred to me that the West has a particularly thorough understanding of Asia, of Asian philosophy, but I found it curious that there is not this understanding about Africa. I thought about how necessary it is that we ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ngozi, in another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London. You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats. Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that's the priority at that particular event. Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker. Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.As a filmmaker who works out of London, the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Jihan, you have a diverse background and multiple identities, you are also polyglot—conversing with ease in Arabic, French, and English, how do you negotiate these identities' How do you bring them together'I'm not sure I have multiple identities; I have multiple spaces in which I navigate. My dad was a diplomat and we moved around my whole childhood. So, we did not have much time to adapt, wherever they plunk you, you need to get on with it. I guess it became a habit. I was born in Lebanon, then we went to Panama, Finland, England, and all over the chart. The first language that I must have read was Finnish. So, when we moved to London my family realized that I only spoke Finnish, they had to get my nanny back ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Wanjiru, what were your experiences with the image while growing up'I've always been fascinated by storytelling and the theater in which I used to take part in school. When I was young, my imagination seemed to function visually. For instance, I could make believe the creatures I was reading about were around me somewhere and what they looked like. An example is that when I read Erich Kästner's "Emil and the Detectives" in 2nd class, I transplanted the whole story into my everyday location, Nairobi. The characters were mainly little boys wearing tattered khaki shorts and shirts, all ganging up together in the streets. It is only when I studied Erich Kästner at university level that I realized that it was a German ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Najwa, how do you express yourself as a filmmaker from the North African Diaspora, as an Arab woman and a woman of the African continent'I cannot say that I am a filmmaker or artist, I can only say that I try to make films. How do I situate myself' First of all, I am an Arab woman living in Montreal. Yesterday, I was speaking to a friend regarding Africa. I told her, "Well, we don't ask ourselves the question 'What are we''" In my case, it is within the context of immigration that I position myself. The question that drives me the most is, "What kind of cinema will I do'"Yes, I am African, I am from the African continent, it is a part of who I am. At the same time, it is more than a continent that I feel, it is ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Shirikiana, could you talk about your film Through the Door of No Return (dir. Shirikiana Aina, 1997) and your process in the making of the film'In this film, I go on a personal journey. It is a documentary, but I would probably call it something closer to a docu-journey because it really is a personal journey back to the continent. I use my father's experience as sort of a bridge to get me there, as a child of Africa in the Diaspora looking for her roots or to reconnect.My father traveled to Africa when I was about seventeen and apparently was trying to move to Ghana. Unfortunately, he contracted malaria. It was fatal, and when he came back, he died. I was a budding adult, but we never had a chance to synthesize ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Jacqueline, your final master's thesis project in Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität, Berlin is a documentary titled "Returning from exile." Could you talk about what inspired you to focus on this theme'Interesting that you say it is a documentary title, because my initial idea was to make a documentary film but I felt I wasn't ready, yet, I might still do it. "Returning from exile" is about the second-generation Ghanaians born in a European country or in the USA to Ghanaian parents, who decided to "return" or rather to live in Ghana. People like me, my tribe so to say. What inspired me to do the visual/audio website is partly my story, but also, I wanted to create a digital archive to register this ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Every other year, thousands take to the air from points in Africa, Europe, and the US to head to the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma du Ouagadougou (FESPACO). Braving searing heat and dust rising from the Sahara Desert, the hordes descend on Ouagadougou, or "Ouaga," as it is affectionately called, the capital city of the tiny West African country Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) for the continent's biggest cultural event.Held in alternate years from the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, the eight-day FESPACO showcases productions from sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean, United States, and Brazil. Burkina Faso was one of the first West African countries to nationalize film production ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This segment incorporates several women's voices regarding the incident at the Women's Meeting at FESPACO in 1991, excerpted from longer interviews. Though I was not in attendance at FESPACO that year—and am left stunned at the thought of what I would have felt if I had—I immediately heard about the details afterwards and this misunderstanding continued to concern me as I prepared my project on African women in cinema in 1995 to begin the following year, which culminated in the book and film Sisters of the Screen (2002). Hence, three editions later in 1997 at FESPACO, during my interviews with several of the women who attended the meeting, I explained my purpose for wanting to revisit this event and asked them to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As a background in which to reconsider positionality and subjectivity within African cinema discourse, I revisit two seminal works that have framed, black diaspora in general, and black women within these diasporas in particular. Reopening the pages of these oeuvres, written three and four decades ago, presents an occasion to explore the evolution of African diaspora, as legacy, concept, discourse, and practice. At the same time, it puts into relief the notion of black as descriptor for African-ness.In the overview of the pioneering anthology The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (1981), editor Filomina Chioma Steady designates unifying themes deemed pivotal to the experiences of most black women throughout the world: ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00