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

The festival's main venue, Cine Neerway

Europe never feels very far away. Two films in competition, ‘Juju Factory’ (from Congo) and ‘Le Sourire du Serpent’ (from Guinea) are set respectively in Brussels and Paris. Another, ‘Africa Paradis’ from Benin’s Sylvestre Amoussou begins in Paris in 2033 – a time when Europe is in political and economic crisis – before leading us to the ‘United States of Africa’, a place of prosperity to which Europeans will do anything to travel and work. The film’s optimistic outlook causes excitement in the cinemas, eliciting huge whoops when one character declares, ‘Five whites will never be worth one black!’ The first time that ‘Africa Paradis’ presents African unity as a living, breathing fact, the crowd goes wild with cheers.

Of the 19 feature films in competition, the majority are funded at least partly by French money, whether from the French government’s generous Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which partially funds FESPACO and continues its commitment to culture in former French colonies, or from French production companies or TV channels such as Arte. Many of the filmmakers with offerings at FESPACO are émigrés who live and work much of the time in Paris, returning to their home countries to shoot. The French capital, in many ways, is one of the principal homes of African cinema – or at least of Francophone African cinema – alongside the thriving film centres of Morocco, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa.

Behind bars: cheap tickets at the Cine Oubri

The Indépendance is a relaxed, bustling Ouagadougou hotel where all the filmmakers stay during the festival. It is here I meet with Newton Aduaka, a London-trained filmmaker who has a movie – ‘Ezra’ – playing in competition. Aduaka was born in Nigeria in 1966 and moved to London to study in the mid-1980s, eventually graduating from the London International Film School in 1990. His first feature, ‘Rage’ (1999) was set amid the black community of south London. ‘Ezra’ is his second and tells of the experience of one child soldier (Mamoudou Turay Kamara), who fights in an unnamed African war.

The film jumps back and forth from this war to a truth and reconciliation hearing, during which Ezra stands against his own relatives in the court’s search for the truth. It’s an intelligent, cleverly measured film, but what’s particularly interesting is how it treads the same path as the recent Hollywood film ‘Blood Diamond’ yet steers clear of that film’s failings by avoiding all Tinseltown trappings. In ‘Ezra’, there’s no Leonardo DiCaprio to lead us by the hand through both an exotic foreign landscape and a host of genre conventions. Instead, the film is raw and truthful. When an exploitative white character does appear in ‘Ezra’ he stays for just a few minutes and is less poster-boy than grey, ugly and corrupt-looking.

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‘I don’t advocate that certain films should be made by certain people,’ Aduaka tells me. ‘But it’s dangerous for Hollywood to play with certain stories, and there are some stories that demand more than entertainment. The DiCaprio character In “Blood Diamond” is of no interest to me.’
Conversation after conversation, film after film, FESPACO feels a million miles away from cinema as we know it. There’s no big money floating about; there’s no undue flattery afforded to actors (it’s the directors who mill about outside screenings, happy to talk to anyone who approaches); there are no agents or publicists.

For a journalist used to the red tape and brown noses of Cannes or Venice or Berlin, it’s approaching heaven.
The festival’s closing ceremony allows for a glimpse of the Burkinabé president, Blaise Campaore. He arrives in the half-full Stade du 4 Aout – the date of the 1983 military coup which brought Campaore’s predecessor, Thomas Sankara to power – to the sound of an enthusiastic MC who screams his name three times into the microphone as if hailing the arrival of an evangelical preacher.