Cannes 2014: Something New in the Air from Africa?

From May 14 to 25, 2014, the sixty-seventh edition of the Cannes Film Festival brought together auteur cinema and glitter. The whole world of cinema was there, showcasing contemporary issues of the planet. Africa and its diasporas (which cannot be dissociated) are often almost absent from the Official Selection, but this time a series of films represented both in all the selection categories. Moreover, while a new generation of filmmakers makes its mark, more and more films are dealing with intercultural problems in France. Something new in the air?

A Facebook message dated March 1, 2013: “For Djinn Carrénard’s second feature, we’re looking for extras, all types, for upcoming days for scenes in public places. Paid. As you well know, we love suspense and secrets, so for more info please contact us by email.” Signed, The Donoma Guerilla Team.

And, voilà, the film is called Fla (for Faire: l’amour / To Make: Love) and it was chosen to open Critics’ Week! In 2011, the Haitian Djinn Carrénard had a hit with Donoma, a film “made with twenty euros” but that won the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize. It sold 11,000 tickets at the box office and all eighteen cast and crew members went on a memorable trip on a tour bus! If Fla was so visible in Cannes, it was thanks to its freedom. “With all the energy of his preceding film,” wrote the Critics’ Week programmers, “the gifted auteur breathes life into his second feature, with a story where the dramatic power, the depth of the characters and situations make this film a truly impactful experience.”

Fla tells a love story between a musician and an incarcerated single mother. Rapper Despo Rutti has the leading role. Despite being regular practitioner of “guerrilla cinema” made using collective improvisation on a shoe-string budget, Carrénard accepted a more traditional production model for his second film. He started shooting in April 2012, but stopped a few days later feeling that he was going in the wrong direction. He started again from scratch a few months later. … How does love develop? How to make love? With a theme such as love he had to innovate!

Sign of the times, the only French film selected by Critics’ Week programmers, Hope shows the odyssey of a young black African couple who try to reach Europe traveling from the southern Sahara to the coast of Morocco. Leonard, a young Cameroonian, comes to the rescue of Hope, a Nigerian. In a hostile world where everyone stays with their own kind, they attempt to continue their journey together, and to love each other. With a background in documentary filmmaking, Boris Lojkine treats this reality—already much explored in film—with an impressive realism and intransigence that justify its recognition at the festival.

Cannes is an extraordinary launch pad for films. Carrénard’s first feature Donoma became famous thanks to a distribution deal with ACID (Association du cinema independent pour sa diffusion).¹ And if a film is in the Official Selection, all the international press talks about it. A total of 4,589 journalists from eighty-six countries were accredited at Cannes in 2013 (as were 29,626 film industry professionals from 124 countries!). Thus in 2006 when Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako was shown out of competition, the press often did not have time to cover these screenings. The film’s box office results of 226,000 tickets sold in France confirm the programmers’ error not to have taken this occasion to put an African film in competition. Since 1997 representation of sub-Saharan Africa in the Official Selection had disappeared. It returned only in 2010 with Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie / A Screaming Man, which won the Jury Prize. Haroun was selected again in 2013 when his film Grigris was in competition.

Nice revenge this year for Sissako’s Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux / Timbuktu, which represented Africa among the eighteen features in competition. Shot in a highly protected village in...