“This Is the Last FESPACO I’ll Be Coming To”: An Interview with Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
- “This Is the Last FESPACO I’ll Be Coming To”An Interview with Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
“This Is the Last FESPACO I’ll Be Coming To’: An Interview with Mahamat- Saleh Haroun,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal, Vol. 3 No. 1 (Winter 2011), 134–140.
FESPACO 2011 is drawing to a close.1 Your declarations during the course of the week have provoked a lot of reactions. How would you judge this year’s festival?
Yet again, the amateurism of the organization is deplorable with the same recurrent hotel room problems. The organizers told us we were booked into the Hotel Indépendance, but that wasn’t the case. They weren’t expecting us. So we were sent to another hotel, but there too, in my case, my name wasn’t on the list. The team in charge of accommodations promised to sort my situation out right away. They promised to phone me to tell me which hotel I would be staying in. I am still waiting for the call. I was left to sort the situation out myself. Added to this lack of respect for cinema and for the filmmakers is the mediocrity of the selection, with films that have no place here, nor in any other festival, films that take us right back to the 1970s, as Souleymane Cisse put it. We are yet again witnessing a negligence that has lead to invited filmmakers not receiving their plane tickets. That was the case with John Akomfrah, who was meant to be President of the Paul Robeson Diaspora Film jury, and the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) jury, which was also forgotten. We supported the African Federation of Critics’ long fight for the FIPRESCI prize to exist; at first FESPACO wouldn’t accept it because it didn’t come with a cash prize. And when a jury was finally created, the jury members didn’t receive their plane tickets and couldn’t come to Ouaga. And nobody has said a thing, nor has anybody apologized. The third problem: certain films selected for the competition and screened before the jury were later withdrawn from the competition on the pretext that they were in digital [format]. We are trapped in a repetition of things, like an incurable illness, as if nothing can change in the forty-one years of the festival’s existence. A lot of filmmakers say it from year to year, but don’t dare say so publicly. I did on Tuesday [End Page 134] night: it’s the last FESPACO I’ll be coming to. From now on, my films will no longer be in competition. If you don’t say things publicly, there is no debate. If I am speaking out, it’s to try to improve things. I know that no human work is perfect, but there is still a limit to what’s tolerable. We are confronted with an inert body, FESPACO, which needs an electric shock treatment to bring it back to life.
A lot of the awards at FESPACO don’t represent us. A lot of the films that have won awards here have had no international recognition. The European Union (EU) has understood that: up until now, its prize was designated by the official jury. For this edition, the EU preferred to create its own jury. Indeed, two years ago, its prize was awarded to a film whose qualities were more than dubious. In 2009, FESPACO thought it was being innovative by creating a Best Poster award. It has to be the only film festival in the world to give a prize to the best poster. A festival like FESPACO is supposed to enlighten the rest of the world as to the quality of our cinema, to help us exist at an international level. If it becomes a sort of Titanic where we all pat ourselves on the back in our mediocrity, then it no longer meets my expectations. I have been coming for sixteen years, but this is where I get off.
If its filmic dimension was managed better, wouldn’t the question of things like hotels be more...
