‘It wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare’: a film festival celebrating the long and complicated history of pan-Africanism | Video

Algiers, 1969. Which, for seven years, the capital of an independent country became, in the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan capital of the entire continent. That summer, Algeria participated in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (Panaf) and the streets of the capital were transformed into a spectacular carnival, with banners announcing the representatives of each country: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.

Imagine the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, then losing, thanks to the photographs taken by William Klein at the event, The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, which show the dissolution of the barriers between the spectators and the spectators – which bring to life the words, shown on the screen, from the first President of Guinea Sékou Touré: “We must come with the people…

Far from meaningless, as the accompanying Barbican movie goes on The Black Planet Project The exhibition, the film program was opened with the video and, in the next three months, will bring several works showing how the project of pan-Africanism affected the lives of Africans and Africans.

Others, including Roy Guerra’s 1979 film Mueda, Memória e Massacre. from Mozambique, dealing with the crimes of colonial criminals such as the massacre of Mueda in 1960 by Portuguese soldiers, and how the act of remembering is part of the struggle for freedom. Others, such as Timité Bassori The Woman with the Knife (1969) is Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Fisi (1992), considers postcolonial culture through psychoanalysis and satire.

For the director of the program, Mr. Matthew Barrington, the film “well-known” is one way to show how the group of Africanism “appears in the way of people and the way they do things”, with the aim that the decisions “are all in dialogue” with each other.

They invite people of different nationalities and ages to “come to the space, see some of these films” and draw connections between them, while finding new ways to enter the subject, through music, group discussions and acting lessons designed to help “different ways of thinking about these films”. Along with the screenings, essays by poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Sarah Lasoye will take place, as well as a set by DJ Coby Sey.

The selected films also seek to draw inspiration from the classics of African cinema without relying too much on the risk-taking canon of multiple male actors. Since the first edition of Project a Black Planet in Chicago, Sarah Maldoror’s works have accompanied the exhibition and will also perform at the Barbican, as Fogo, l’île de feu. – it was released in the same year as Guerra’s Mueda – which takes Cape Verde as its place of reflection on land and work after the beginning of independence.

Annouchka de Andrade, founder of Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andradehe has spent several years working to protect the rights, restore and distribute his mother’s films, while assembling a film and book project about her life.

In the case of Sambizanga, perhaps Maldoror’s best-known work, de Andrade noted that it was “kept by the producer for 40 years… and he didn’t have any book” where Maldoror had to challenge racism and corporate discrimination as a black woman. The struggle was aggravated by the lack of funding, so that more than 50 of his planned projects were not completed.

Even Maldoror was recognized as an assistant to Klein’s work in the production of Panaf’s film – a production often characterized by an overwhelming male gaze and described in Elaine Mokhtefi’s biography. Algiers, Third World Capital as “beyond the creativity of Klein’s organization” – the risk of its selection from the popular discourse of pan-Africanism is a well-known phenomenon.

De Andrade pointed out that “his first three films were dedicated to the war in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, but they were not part of the men’s story, and when you see a photo of all the people at the first Congress of Black Artists and Writers, you have only one woman (but) Sarah was in the room”, not mentioning the involvement of writers such as Suzanne Cesaireleading genius of carelessness walking.

Négritude is clearly a conflict in Panaf, something that represents the nature of the political conflict between the Algerian government that wants to take the role of “third country” against the conservative governments that Léopold Senghor of Senegal did three years ago.

Some of these issues emerge from the Ambiguous Encounters season, organized by Abiba Coulibaly, which marks 60 years in September since Fesman and the Tricontinental meeting in Cuba took place.

Inspired by his work at the Brixton Community Cinema and his studies in geography, Coulibaly explores the African cities of Dakar, Algiers and Lagos (where the second edition of the World Festival of Black Arts was held in 1977) without the intention of disrupting the culture of Africanism, but “having distractions”

Beyond its borders, the season explores the borderless realms of pan-Africanism including the influence of Havana and diasporic cinema such as Ola Balogun’s Nigerian-Brazilian collaboration, Black Goddess.

So how do you understand? pan-Africanism? That is the question posed by Kodwo Eshun, co-founder Otolith group whose films In the Year of the Quiet Sun and Nucleus of the Great Union will also be shown during this time and “directly speaking” about it. Eshun said that although the term has many meanings, the group’s argument is that “Pan-Africanism is the revolution of the world, which means the revolution of the world…

In the evening of Panaf, when the eyes of Africa were looking at Algiers, another event was happening, even on Earth – July 1969 was the month of Apollo 11’s mission to the moon. Over the years, in an era that looks to the sky to disrupt the world, the basis of the revolutionary vision of pan-Africanism makes for compelling viewing.