Premium
Tunisian filmmaker, critic, and historian Férid Boughedir's 1983 documentary "Caméra d'Afrique" screens in 2K restoration at the 33rd New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) today, Saturday, May 9, at noon local time, followed by an extended conversation with the director, who NYAFF has named an honored pioneer. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar in 1983 and returned to Cannes Classics in 2019, restored by France's Center national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) with support from the Institut français. It is, for now, the best one-stop primer on the first generation of postcolonial African auteur cinema; the extended conversation is the appropriate form for a guest whose practice doubles as historiography.
"Caméra d'Afrique" fuses extracts from films, interviews with filmmakers, and rare archival footage. The roster of speakers is the index of an entire generational movement — Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, Safi Faye, Souleymane Cissé, Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, Inoussa Ousseini, Gaston Kaboré, and Tahar Cheriaa, the Tunisian critic who founded the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) in 1966. This was three years before Burkina Faso's Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) opened in 1969, and effectively invented the institutional space in which an African auteur cinema could be discussed at all.
