Through the Eye of a Film Festival: Toward a Curatorial and Spectator Centered Approach to the Study of African Screen Media

Most scholarship on African screen media acknowledges outright that there have been, and continue to be, many trends and traditions in filmmaking across the continent and in the African diasporas, making it impossible to distinguish any particular coherence to the category of African filmmaking. Many scholars have advanced this argument through analysis of distinct production infrastructures, films, genres, nationally located cinemas, particular filmmakers, and critical concepts such as tradition and modernity.¹ Furthermore, the rise of popular video-movie making in Ghana and Nigeria from the late 1980s onward, and the discussion and research that have grown around that practice, have compelled scholars of African screen media to pay far greater attention to the “different material conditions of creation, circulation, and consumption” of audiovisual cultural products.² There has been relatively little research, however, on the specific sites where films are screened, consumed, and interpreted: film festivals, multiplex cinemas, makeshift video halls, people’s homes and courtyards, and internet cafés. The focus of my current research, and of this essay, is film festivals, both as global sites for the curation and reception of films by Africans and as sites within the African continent for the curation and reception of films from all over the world.³

One apparent typology (and chronology) for analysis would group film festivals that screen films by Africans as follows: African film festivals on the African continent (founded from the mid-1960s, such as FESPACO, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso), international film festivals on the African continent (founded from the late 1970s, such as the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa), African film festivals outside of the continent (founded from the late 1970s, such as the New York African Film Festival), and international film festivals outside the continent that have particular curators and/or programs dedicated to films by Africans (where this specific focus on Africa has emerged since the late 1990s, such as at the Dubai International Film Festival).

Other typologies worthy of analysis cut across this map, however. For example, in the category of international film festivals on the African continent (which have proliferated at a rapid rate since 2000), there are markedly distinct curatorial visions and practices. Where many (African) filmmakers feel that the Durban International Film Festival, with its Talent Campus and FilmMart (a film market) modeled on those of “A-list” film festivals, offers the most significant professional opportunities to filmmakers of all the festivals on the continent, other festivals bring a different version of the international and global into play to distinct ends. For example, the FiSahara Film Festival (founded in 2004), which is the only annual film festival in the world to take place in a refugee camp (Dakhla, in Algeria), has as its aim mobilizing international activism on behalf of a specific, local cause: the claim of the Sahrawi people to the Western Sahara, which was annexed from them by Morocco in 1975. The arrival in 2013 of a completely new kind of film festival related to African film—the first Online South African Film Festival—unsettles festivals’ typical relationship to live publics and suggests further productive typologies for analysis of both film festivals and online, digital platforms and their respective curatorial approaches to films by Africans. Initiated by the video-on-demand (VOD) platform AfricaFilms.tv, presided over by veteran South African filmmaker Ramadan Suleman, and curated by Lesedi Moche (former director of the Encounters Documentary Film Festival in South Africa), the first Online South African Film Festival ran from July 18 to September 22, 2013, and offered viewers the chance to rent or buy 150 rarely accessible South African films and television series.

The impulse behind much of the African video-movie scholarship is the same as the impulse behind the study of film festivals, a relatively new academic subfield, and one that seeks to rematerialize film studies, albeit from an entirely different angle to the video scholarship.⁴ My current research aims to take up the...