Journal of African Cinemas - FESPACO@50 - Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Africa’s Most Important Film Festival and Cultural Event, Nov 2022

The Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) celebrated its golden jubilee at its 26th edition in 2019. This marks a time for reflection and assessment of the future of the festival. The 50th anniversary also represents a key juncture for scholars and practitioners to rethink curatorial practice in Africa to enable film festivals to function also as a medium of production and dissemination of critical discourse on African screen media. FESPACO has a longstanding tradition of continually producing archives of knowledge about African cinema. The study of the relationships between FESPACO and critical discourse on African cinema offers a template for other festivals to follow, thus opening a new discursive space in the emerging field of film festival studies.

This article uses the changing fortunes of actors at the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) over the last 50 years as a point of departure to examine how their creative agency and professional opportunities have been delimited by the dominant film culture in West Africa. Taking into consideration the various efforts, such as awards and the organization of colloquia, made by the festival to recognize their work, it argues that the discontinuity of such promotion has kept them overshadowed by directors, for whom the festival was initially established. It examines the iconography of the star as introduced to Africa by commercial imports and deconstructed by filmmakers like Djibril Diop Mambéty and Flora Gomes. This article posits that the transnational circulation of certain key performers within West African cinema bears the promise of a more elaborate network of African film production and distribution to come.

The cinema as a medium and an art form has been a major consideration in Africa’s struggles against colonialism. These struggles, which encompass aspirations to establish Africa’s cultural and political autonomy in the postcolonial era, are ongoing. Marking the 26th edition of the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television (FESPACO) therefore was considered as an important opportunity for reflection. More so, the occasion was taken as a call to re-engage with the challenge of shaping and transforming ‘the Continent’s greatest cultural event’ for the future. The 2019 festival was launched around the colloquium theme: ‘Confronting our memory and shaping the future of a Pan-African cinema in its essence, economy and diversity’. This article begins with an account of the colloquium and reflects on the knowledge production dimension of the festival, which has been a core component of FESPACO’s identity and existence. It also seeks to situate the event of the 50th anniversary in a continuum of critical discussions about the festival, its past, present and future, and in relation to the seminal aspirations of African filmmakers for an African cinema, its challenges and opportunities.