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

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The crowd stands obediently for Campaore but most of the 10,000 or so folk in the stadium remain silent, patently not sharing the enthusiasm of the MC for their president, who is flanked by a small group of guards dressed in a glaring red, Napoleonic-style military uniform, an odd hangover from the colonial era.

Proceedings at the ceremony elicit their own strange comedy. Music and dance punctuate the dispersal of awards – the man who gets the crowd ten times more worked up than the president is DJ Lewis, a performer from neighbouring Ivory Coast who jumps off the small makeshift stage on to the football pitch, whips off his shirt and launches into a wild dance routine. He body-pops on the asphalt with his arms and legs rigid and then suddenly darts off and runs halfway around the stadium before returning to the stage. Next, he catches a chicken that’s been thrown at him from backstage and proceeds to dance around furiously with the bird clasped in his hands.

Bemusement turns to discomfort when DJ Lewis throws the chicken to the ground. The poor cockerel hobbles around weirdly, obviously lame, with one leg and maybe also a wing broken. In America, this would be a Janet Jackson ‘nipple’ moment, but here, the crowd go mad. It’s only later, after a spot of Googling, that I discover DJ Lewis is a sensation in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, where last year he invented a dance that apes the death of a crazed chicken as a way of warding off the threat of bird flu.

There are 23 prizes to dish out, covering television, documentaries, videos and films, both long and short. There are 204 films at the festival, but it’s the 19 feature films competing for the top prizes that most people care about, and, in particular, the main award – the wonderfully named Etalon D’Or de Yennenga, or Golden Stallion of Yennenga. As each prize is announced, the winner comes to the stage followed, strangely, by the person handing it out, who walks along a red carpet from the VIP seating area – more often than not is a government minister or a foreign dignitary.

Ouagadougou's answer to Wembley

The prizes are well picked by the seven-person jury of writers, filmmakers and one musician. The bronze stallion goes to ‘Daratt’ (or ‘Dry Season’) by the Chad filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, an evocatively shot parable of post-war reconciliation, which will have a London release in July. The silver gong is awarded to ‘Les Saignantes’, an imaginative film from Cameroon about two women who have to dispose of the body of a government minister who dies while having sex with one of the pair: it’s a film that mixes black comedy with horror and political satire and defies those who complain that quality African films, as one witty detractor put it to me, are always dreary and about ‘one boy and a goat’.

But its my new friend Newton Aduaka who wins the top prize of the Golden Stallion trophy and 10 million CFA Francs (£10,000) – handed over by President Campaore himself – for ‘Ezra’. Aduaka comes to the stage, apologises for not speaking French and explains in English that his only sadness is that the story of his film – the fallout of brutal African wars involving child soldiers – remains a fact, award or no award.

Fireworks blast into the night, incinerating the equivalent of a sizeable proportion of the country’s less-sizeable GDP, and crowds pour into the night, past a line-up of shiny ministerial Peugeots (future taxis, no doubt) and past a dark Mercedes with the Burkinabé flag hanging over the bonnet which will ferry Campaore away. Over the radio, the headline news is that ‘Ezra’ has nabbed the festival’s top prize and back in the city centre crowds queue to catch screenings of all the winning films as the filmmakers dash not to a swanky post-ceremony awards dinner, but once again to introduce their films to local audiences, although this time cradling gleaming trophies in their arms.

For a full interview with ‘Ezra’ director Newton Aduaka, see Film.