Exile and the “Burden of Representation”: Trends in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Francophone African Filmmaking

For a number of sub-Saharan Francophone Africa’s most prolific filmmakers resident in Europe, itinerancy and the subsequent plurality of identities engenders a blurring of boundaries that is inevitably reflected in their works. Many of these filmmakers explicitly explore the themes of exile and return. Embracing and exploring this “in-betweenness” as they negotiate their cultures of origin and those in which they live, their films gain critical and syncretic possibilities. This increasingly visible thematic and aesthetic hybridity can at the same time be seen as intrinsically related to a marking characteristic of sub-Saharan African filmmaking since its inception: the desire to challenge dominant discourse’s problematic hegemonic representations of the African continent. Constituting an ever-present “burden of representation,” this desire helps to explain the continuing prevalence of a socially responsible vein of filmmaking among Africa’s contemporary generation of Europe-based filmmakers, and suggests that diversification and continuity are not necessarily antinomic in this context.