The pan-African film cycle tigritudes is on view until February 27 at the Forum des images, in France. The program will then travel. Its itinerary will include stops in Africa that will allow African audiences to discover productions that are often inaccessible to them. Interview with Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Dyane Gaye who is leading this project with documentary filmmaker Valérie Osouf.
How did the idea of ”Tigritudes” come about?
We feed with my friend and director Valérie Osouf, with whom I have co-programmed this cycle, this idea for about 25 years, at the time when we met I believe. To know how to think about a festival, an event around the cinemas of Africa. Our friendship is very nourished by our cinephilia and our love of African cinemas. We wanted to share these films and we talked about this project regularly. We are delighted today to finally see this cycle which was initiated as part of the Africa 2020 Season. It should have been presented initially in October 2020, then in March-April 2021. Our dream is finally came to fruition after two postponements for all the reasons we know, thanks to our partner and co-producer, the Forum des images.
Your cinephilia has nourished this programming. Therefore, it must have been easy to do since you knew the works you wanted to show…
Not necessarily. We had a common base of heritage films or more contemporary works because we are both directors and we thus have the opportunity to see many films through festivals and to meet filmmakers. We did a lot of research because it was important to us to give the broadest possible vision of African cinemas, to present the greatest number of works from different countries. The singularity of tigritudes is due to the fact that it is a chronological cycle. We backed the great independence movement. We start with that of Sudan in 1956 and we go back to 2021, at the rate of one session per year. It can be an opportunity to discover a film or a program of short films.
It’s interesting to be able to show works in a kind of continuity, both on the continent and in its Afro-descendant diaspora since we also present films from Haiti, Cuba, the United States, the Caribbean and Great Britain. It is also interesting to observe the resonances between the films, the forms, the circulation of issues and struggles, the way in which all of this dialogues chronologically. I think that’s what makes this anthology unique, which is not a retrospective, because we are simply two filmmakers who share our desire to transmit cinema. It’s the way we both look, we’re not programmers but filmmakers, it would be pretentious to talk about a retrospective. Once again, it’s a sharing of our cinephilia.
How many films did you watch to establish this selection of more than a hundred productions?
All formats – short and feature films, documentaries, art films, animated films –, nearly a thousand in three years.
What audience are you expecting? What is the pedagogy, if there is one, behind this cycle?
That’s what I said in the preamble. We expect all audiences, including the youngest. Me, I grew up in France in the 80s, I didn’t have access to African cinematography. As a child, I went to see Disney and others. Today, these young people have the opportunity to see films from all over the world. Indeed, there is this idea of making these films accessible to the widest possible audience by also offering a programming axis that gives a view of all of Africa. Very often, in France, we are very accustomed to seeing, for example and separately moreover, cinematographies from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan films. Which is closely linked to the colonial history of France. Consequently, it is easier to see films from Mali, Burkina Faso or Senegal in France. But much more rarely productions from Portuguese or English-speaking Africa and all this together in the same program even more rarely. Whereas what interests us precisely is to bring together works from all over the continent in a single and unique cycle in order to realize the incredible richness of its cinematographies.
You plan for this anthology to travel and for the films to be seen in Africa. Which is notable given the distribution problems experienced by African works on their own continent…
The program will go on roaming. We told ourselves that we hadn’t done all this work just for Paris. It is important that this programming circulates in Africa. On the continent, the first will take place in the spring, in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, then tigritudes will take the direction of Senegal. He has to travel on the continent, where we have a lot of relays so that people can reclaim their cinema history. As we know, distribution is complicated on this side of the world, but it is even more so on the continent where the films were made. It’s extremely important to us that these works return to their original audience.
We were talking about distribution issues. Could this cycle be available in a box for example?
Absoutely. We will first make a book that will follow the cycle. We do things little by little because we are a small team. We are going to restore meetings of the cycle − two master classes, cinema lessons, transversal meetings −, all this material will be filmed and reproduced in a book. The latter will also be an educational place that will put into perspective the works, the struggles, the liberations and the independences on the continent. We will commission texts from authors and filmmakers. We would also like to put a quadrilingual site online − Arabic, Portuguese, French and English − for the public who would not have access to the rooms, a sort of database, a place of resources for, for example, young film enthusiasts from the African continent and students so that they can access a place where the films and the work that we were able to do around tigritudes.