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

Ougadougou's premier taxi service

Such is the power here of the taxi. All of them are battered old Peugeots whose windscreens appear to have been caved in with truncheons. They come with eccentricities. Should you wish to open the window, the driver will pass you a handle. Should you wish to build a sandcastle, there’s enough dirt on the floor to do just that – motte, bailey and turrets. One tip, though: if you find yourself in Ouagadougou, check that your taxi has brakes. Not all do, as I found out when one collided with an unsuspecting moped.

The relaxed attitude to road safety is indicative of the unfussy, easy-going atmosphere of the event itself. Posters outside cinemas are often hand-written (or scribbled, and not always correctly: ‘Bood Diamond’, 18H 30). Films start roughly on time, but no one’s complaining if the curtain (if there is one) goes up half an hour late. There’s much that’s amusing for anyone used to watching movies in Europe. Before each screening, a young man beating a traditional drum follows the director on to the stage. An interpreter who translates the directors’ preambles into English bellows into his microphone with all the melodrama and intonation of a wrestling announcer, while the local advert for insurance, which plays on a hellish loop before most films looks like it’s been knocked up as part of a last-minute GCSE Media Studies project.

Interestingly, a syrupy Coca-Cola commercial that appears ahead of every single film is greeted by intensifying jeers. By the end of the festival, the clamour has reached such a pitch I fully expect someone to rip the screen off the wall in protest.

The film fest on the box

The films showing here are not the cheap, straight-to-DVD, soapy-and-schlocky African numbers that pour out of Nigeria and Ghana, and into the market stalls of Peckham or Dalston by the hundreds each year. Instead, FESPACO is a celebration of quality African cinema, of films that have a small chance at least of moving and inspiring audiences not only outside their countries but even outside of Africa.

In London – in Europe – we see pitifully few African films. Roughly three or four make the long journey to our screens each year. Recent examples are Abderrahmane Sissako’s ‘Bamako’, Faouzi Bensaidi’s ‘Mille Mois’, and Gavin Hood’s ‘Tsotsi’, which last year won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

Reels on the move

Unlike the cinema of Asia or Latin America, films from Africa barely figure in our city’s film landscape beyond extraordinary seasons and festivals. This year, not one British distributor made the journey to the festival. Beside myself, there was only one other British film journalist present, so it was hardly surprising when a filmmaker who had spent many years in London blurted out, ‘What the fuck is Time Out doing in Ouagadougou?’ when I introduced myself. Yet the films at FESPACO scream with importance. There’s a keen awareness among African filmmakers that they are very lucky to be making movies here. They’re not about to squander this opportunity by making films about superheroes. Politics are never very far away from most of their films, but neither are smart writing and interesting aesthetics.

Just consider these highlights. From Tunisia, Nouri Bouzid’s ‘Making Off’ deals with the radicalisation of a young Muslim and plays with ideas of narrative manipulation by filmmakers covering such a hot topic. From Chad, Serge Issa Coélo’s ‘Tartina City’ tells with startling bravery the story of a young journalist who is wrongly imprisoned and tortured by the government (Coelo told me that he made his film for an astonishing €270,000 and that he’s one of only two filmmakers from Chad, both of whom live in Paris). From Guinea, Gahité Fofana’s ‘Un Matin Bonne Heure’ traces with compassion and precision the back-story of two teenagers who’ve decided to stow away on a flight bound for Belgium. As well as politics, the push and pull of tradition and modernity haunt many titles here. The best of these is the brilliant ‘Il Va Pleuvoir sur Conakry’ (‘It’s Going To Rain on Conakry’) from Guinea in which a young man’s imminent passage to fatherhood outside of marriage conflicts dramatically with the ideas of his father, an Imam.