Burkina Faso's film festival

Not many film festivals boast sweat-sodden cinemas, dodgy projectors, taxis lacking door handles or brakes and chickens being maimed as part of the prize-giving ceremony. But then, not many film festivals are anything like Burkina Faso's. Time Out reports from the movie capital of Africa

Festival HQ

For one week every two years, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso welcomes the carnival that is Africa’s largest, most vital film festival. The city is home to FESPACO – the Festival Pan-Africain du Cinema et de la Television à Ouagadougou – and everywhere you go in this small, sub-Saharan city, the talking point is cinema, from the thousands who travel to the country to watch films from all over the continent, to the locals who flock to the screens each night. Even the main square is called Place des Cineastes, and it’s said that Ouagadougou, despite its size (population 100,000), poverty and isolation, has the most cinemas of any town in west Africa. Many are open-air and punters fill every seat, step and inch of floorspace to catch titles from across Africa.

Indoors, the organisers try to temper the searing temperatures with air conditioning, to little avail: sweat is as inevitable as the dodgy reel changes and sound failures that characterise nearly every screening.

As film festivals go, FESPACO is raw. The important deals in Ouagadougou are made not at crowded parties or on hotel terraces, but on the back seats of ageing taxis that are falling to pieces even as you ride in them. Cab drivers in this dusty, smoky city only move when their vehicles are (at least) fully laden. Which means that if you’re not sitting in the front of the car and explaining to the driver how London and England are in fact closely linked, or struggling to make clear in broken French that you’ve spent the first two hours of the morning trying and failing to understand the dialogue of a Burkinabé film devoid of subtitles, then you’re probably squashed on the back seat with a group of strangers who are in town to watch films, show films or make films.

Place des Cineastes

Over the course of seven days in this lesser-known region of sub-Saharan west Africa – north of Ghana, south of Mali, west of Niger – I’ve met a diverse mix of people in the backs of sweaty, filthy cabs, each of them sharing with me a hairy ride across the city for £1.20. There was the young Malian looking to find support for his documentary about the history of music in his country. There was the journalist from Ivory Coast who offered his tips for the festival’s top prize. And there was the Dutch woman who persuaded me to redirect our driver to the local film school, which opened two years ago.

It was this last detour which led to a fascinating meeting with local film students and, early the next morning, a chat with the director of the school himself, Privat RochTapsoba, about his work and that of his 11 students (all from various African countries, bar one European, hailing from Bosnia). Tapsoba sat resplendent in an eye-popping purple African suit while explaining his hope that this film school will develop an international reputation by building links with schools and filmmakers across the world.