Down and dusty at FESPACO

Dave Calhoun takes his seat at Africa's premiere film festival in Burkina Faso.

Mar  7 2007

One of the most important film events in the world took place over the past fortnight – no, not in Los Angeles' Kodak Theatre, but in Ouagadougou, the dusty and poor capital of French-speaking Burkina Faso in sub-Saharan west Africa. FESPACO – the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et du Télévision de Ouagadougou – takes place every two years in a city renowned in this part of the world for its enthusiasm for cinema.

One of the main squares here is the Place Des Cinéastes, and FESPACO is Africa's largest film festival, to which African film-makers established and new, young and old, make a pilgrimage every two years to show their films, watch the films of others or simply sit by the pool of the thriving Hotel Independence and shoot the breeze about the state and direction of a continental cinema that struggles continually for recognition and survival. It's a relaxed, casual affair, free of the over-organisation and crowds of most European festivals, and – blissfully– there's not a publicist or an agent in sight. This is a festival without the middle men: if you want to speak to a distinguished film-maker – even Souleymane Cissé perhaps – you simply introduce yourself poolside.

While film-makers at other festivals compete for golden palms or bears or lions, here it's a stallion – L'Etalon d'Or – that's on offer for the best film in competition. In 2005, that prize was won by a Burkinabe film-maker, Fanta Regina Necro, for her 'Night of Truth', a film that fearlessly examined war and reconciliation in modern Africa.

The films playing this year at the festival's twentieth anniversary edition more than live up to their predecessors – and come in all shapes and sizes, from ballsy finger-pointing at corrupt governments to gangster movies that look longingly across the Atlantic for inspiration. Watching films here is like taking a tour of the continent, its cities and its people. One minute you're contemplating the lives of two young men about to stow away on a Europe-bound flight from Guinea ('Un Matin Bonne Heure'), the next you're following the daring tragedy of a journalist being tortured in Chad ('Tartina City'). There are a couple of familiar films here too: Gavin Hood's South African township tale 'Tsotsi', which won an Oscar last year, is playing in competition, and Abderrahmane Sissako's 'Bamako', which is in London cinemas now, is being afforded a special screening. One very impressive new title is 'Ezra' by Newton Aduaka, a Nigerian-born film-maker who studied at the London International Film School in the late 1980s, lived in the capital for 18 years (during which he made the London-set 'Rage'), and now lives in Paris. 'Ezra' puts 'Blood Diamond' to shame by following with great intelligence and humanity the fate of one child soldier during an unnamed African conflict during the 1990s.

There are two main venues here – the Cine Burkina and the Cine Neerwaya, into which crowds spill until the floors and steps as well as the seats are full – and two outdoor screens, as well as several other temporary theatres that have been set up especially for the event. Festival-goers dart between cinemas in battered old Peugeots that serve as cabs or even hitch rides on the backs of mopeds to buzz across a city that barely ever gets clogged up with traffic and in which nothing is ever very far away.

As a country, Burkina Faso is creeping up towards the Sahara and so possesses something of an edge-of-the-desert character. Vegetation is a rarity, moisture even more so, and there's space everywhere. Shops are exclusively small, buildings are almost all low-standing and there's always room to breathe (as long as the car fumes aren't too pungent and not too much dust is thrown up by the wind). In the backs of shared cabs you quickly make friends – film-makers, other writers – and it's a relief when the temperature drops from 38 degrees to 22 at night and a cool breeze flows through an open-air screen.

The French connection to FESPACO in this former colony is evident everywhere. The French government is one of the main funders of the event and also responsible (at least partly) for the funding of the majority of the twenty films showing in competition. There are movies from all over the continent, but the Francophone countries – Chad, Mali, Benin, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal and others – produce most of what we consider to be African cinema. Time and time again, films are presented here by African film-makers who now live, or at least studied, in Paris, such as Mahamat Saleh Haroun from Chad and his 'Darratt', a story of post-war reconciliation, or Sylvestre Amoussou from Benin and his 'Africa Paradis', a film which imagines a time 25 years from now when refugees from a devastated Europe try desperately to make the illegal journey to a prosperous, unwelcoming Africa and when England has become a colony of Guatemala. It's a strange, exhilarating feeling to be in a cinema largely filled with Africans when a character on screen declares that 'five whites will never be worth one black'. It's even stranger when the crowd starts cheering and clapping in agreement all around you.

Dave Calhoun's full report from Ouagadougou will appear online in two weeks' time.

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