Dictionary of African Filmmakers

Transcription

1 Roy Armes is Professor Emeritus of Film at Middlesex University in the U.K. He has published many works on film including (with Lizbeth Malkmus) Arab and African Film Making; Dictionary of North African Film Makers; Postcolonial Images (Indiana University Press, 2005); and African Filmmaking (Indiana University Press, 2006). Africa Film & Media INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis A landmark reference tool for African film Armes Dictionary of African Filmmakers Dictionary of African Filmmakers An invaluable project. Kevin Dwyer, American University in Cairo [A book] of tremendous importance and utility to scholars, researchers, students, and the public at large. Michael Martin, Black Film Center/Archives, Indiana University Compiled by eminent Africanist film scholar Roy Armes, Dictionary of African Filmmakers is an inclusive, comprehensive treatment of films and filmmaking on the African continent. The dictionary covers African feature film making from the first locally produced films to today s thriving film industry, listing over 5,400 films made by more than 1,250 filmmakers in 37 countries. Part 1 includes information on filmmakers and provides date and place of birth, training or film experience, other creative activities, and a list of feature films produced. Part 2 presents a national chronology, filmography, and bibliography for each country producing feature films. Part 3 indexes film titles and provides translations into English or French where appropriate. This book is an essential reference tool for anyone who wants to know more about the vibrant and exciting world of African film INDIANA Roy Armes Lithograph on Arches Vellum paper from the Red Square Lithograph Collection, Nja Mahdaoui. All rights reserved.

2 Dictionary of African Filmmakers

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4 Dictionary of African Filmmakers ROY ARMES Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

5 This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN USA Telephone orders Fax orders Orders by e- mail iuporder@indiana.edu 2008 by Roy Armes All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z manufactured in the united states of america Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Armes, Roy. Dictionary of African filmmakers / Roy Armes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Motion picture producers and directors Africa Biography Dictionaries. 2. Motion picture producers and directors Africa Credits. I. Title. PN A dc22 [B]

6 For Martine Leroy to whom all students of African film owe a huge debt

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8 The ability to picture oneself is a vital need. In fact, if a man were to live without the capacity of forging a picture of himself, he would have no aspirations, no desires, no dreams of his own. The same applies to a community, a society and a people. A society daily subjected to foreign images eventually loses its identity and its capacity to forge its own destiny. The development of Africa implies among other things the production of its own images. Gaston Kaboré The Ability to Picture Oneself

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10 CONTENTS acknowledgments xi Introduction: Mapping the Field Feature Filmmaking in Africa 1 Part 1 African Feature Filmmakers 17 Part 2 Feature Film Chronologies 139 Part 3 Index of Film Titles 265 bibliography 393

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12 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is essentially a work of synthesis, and in compiling it, I have drawn on the full range of resources in my library, listed in the bibliography or at the end of the chronologies in the national listings. The principal published sources on which I have drawn, and which all contain more information on specific films than can be contained here, are, in order of publication: Guy Hennebelle, ed., Les Cinémas africains en 1972 (Paris: Société Africaine d Édition, 1972); Claude- Michel Cluny, Dictionnaire des nouveaux cinémas arabes (Paris: Sindbad, 1978); Victor Bachy, Dictionnaire de 250 cinéastes, in Jacques Binet, Ferid Boughedir, and Victor Bachy, eds., Cinémas noirs d Afrique (Paris: CinémAction 26, 1983); Keyan Tomaselli, Les Films sud- africains depuis 1910, and Alex Holt, Christo Doherty, and Keyan Tomaselli, Dictionnaire de trente cinéastes sud- africains, in Keyan Tomaselli, ed., Le Cinéma sud- africain est- il tombé sur la tête? (Paris: L Afrique Littéraire 78/CinémAction 39, 1986); Ibrahim al- Ariss, Mouny Berrah, Claude Michel Cluny, Jacques Lévy, and Yves Thoraval, Dictionnaire de 80 cinéastes, in Mouny Berrah, Jacques Lévy, and Claude Michel Cluny, eds., Les Cinémas arabes (Paris: CinémAction 43/ Cerf/ Institut du Monde Arabe, 1987); Nancy Schmidt, Sub- Saharan Films and Film Makers: An Annotated Bibliography (London: Zell, 1988); Keyan Tomaselli. The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film (London: Routledge, 1989); Hedi Dohoukar, 25 cinéastes plus ou moins beurs, in Guy Hennebelle and Roland Schneider, eds., Cinémas métis: De Hollywood aux films beurs (Paris: CinémAction 56/Hommes et Migrations/Corlet/Télérama, 1990); Afolabi Adesanya, ed., The Nigerian Film/ TV Index (Ikeja: A- Productions Nigeria, 1992); Johan Blignaut and Martin Botha, Movies Moguls Mavericks: South African Cinema (Cape Town: Showdata, 1992); Keith Shiri, ed., Directory of African Film- Makers and Films (Trowbridge, England: Flicks Books, 1992); Alberto Elena, El cine del tercer mundo: diccionario de realizadores (Madrid: Ediciones Turfan, 1993); Andrea Morini, Erfan Rashid, Anna Di Martino, and Adriano Aprà, Il cinema dei paesi arabi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1993); Luciana Fina, Cristina Fina, and António Loja Neves, Os realizadores e os filmes, in Cinemas de África (Lisbon: Cinemateca Portugesa & Culturgest, 1995); Touti Moumen, Films tunisiens, long métrages (Tunis: Touti Moumen, 1998); L Association des Trois Mondes/ Fespaco, Les Cinémas d Afrique (Paris: Éditions Karthala and Éditions ATM, 2000); Khalid El Khodari, Guide des réalisateurs marocains (Rabat, Morocco: Khalid El Khodari, 2000); Hyginus Ekwuazi, Nigerian Cinema: Pioneers and Practitioners (Jos, Nigeria: National Film Institute, 2004); Youssef Chérif Rizkallah, Répertoire des réalisateurs, Kamal Ramzi, Répertoire des acteurs, and Ali Abou Chadi and Layanne Chawaf, Répertoire des films, in Magda Wassef, ed., Egypte, 100 ans de cinéma (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe and Éditions Plume, 2005); Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005); Alberto Elena, ed., Balcón Atlantico: las mil y una imágenes de cine marroquí (Las Palmas/ Madrid: Festival Internacional de Cine de las Palmas de Gran Canaria/T&B Editores, 2007). Equally indispensable are Olivier Barlet s Africultures website ( the Africiné website of the Fédération Africaine de la Critique Cinématographique ( that of the Guild

13 xii Acknowledgments of African Filmmakers ( the Association des Trois Mondes ( Images Nord-Sud, edited by Martine Leroy and Dominique Sentilhes; and the meticulous documentation of South African mainstream feature films, compiled by Trevor T. Moses and held at the South African National Film Video and Sound Archive (SANFVSA) in Pretoria. Individuals to whom I owe a very real and specific debt for information and encouragement (beyond the call of duty) include Seham Abdel Salam, Afolabi Adesanya, Steve Ayorinde, Imruh Bakari, Olivier Barlet, Martin P. Botha, Kevin Dwyer, Alberto Elena, Kedmon Hungwe, Jacqueline Mainguard, Zunaid Mansoor, Martin Mhando, Trevor T. Moses, Ogova Ondego, Jeffrey Ruoff, Keith Shiri, Joanna Sterkowitz, Trevor Taylor, Keyan Tomaselli, and Angela van Schalkwyck. I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a second Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, which helped finance this dictionary and has provided funding for the research to be undertaken for the companion volume, a discussion of Issues in African Film. Though I have made every effort to check information, errors and omissions are inevitable in a work of this nature and I would welcome contact from any readers who can help correct the mistakes and fill the gaps.

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16 INTRODUCTION: Mapping the Field Feature Filmmaking in Africa There is no single entity called African cinema, and the films produced in Africa over the past hundred years offer at best a very partial (if totally fascinating) image of the history and current development of the continent. Africa itself can be defined unambiguously in geographical terms: an enormous land mass, stretching over 4,500 miles at its widest point and measuring some 5,000 miles from north to south, with which are associated a range of widely spread and totally diverse islands, from Madagascar and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to St. Helena in the South Atlantic and the Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries in the North Atlantic. But as soon as we depart from the geography of the continent, problems of definition both cultural and national become acute. The heritage of colonialism is everywhere apparent. Arbitrary boundaries inherited from the colonial era divide some communities into two, while elsewhere artificially yoking together totally divergent groups into newly defined nation- states. To the north there are recurring tensions between Arabs and non- Arabs (as in the issue of the Berber communities) and between Muslims and Christians (particularly in Nigeria and Sudan). To the south there is the anomaly of the white population of South Africa and the question of its place in a wider Africa. Across Africa the all- too- prevalent dictatorships drive artists and intellectuals into exile, and at the same time the whole continent is shaken both by mass migrations of whole populations fleeing recurrent wars and famines and by tens of thousands of mostly young men annually seeking to emigrate to Europe for economic survival. African cinemas and the writings about them inevitably reflect these tensions and ambiguities. At the time when the cinematograph and its successors were first introduced into Africa as early as 1896 in Algeria and South Africa, 1897 in Morocco and Tunisia,

17 2 Dictionary of African Filmmakers 1903 in Nigeria the continent was suffering the aftermath of the Berlin conference on the partition of Africa, where European states carved out African empires for themselves. Before the outbreak of World War I, France had annexed Algeria, set up protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and established its two super colonies, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, while Great Britain had conquered Sudan and unified Nigeria. Local filmmaking in Africa is one of the developments which has occurred as this process of colonization has been gradually reversed and independent African states have emerged. The first feature film (now unfortunately lost) was made in South Africa in 1910, the year in which Louis Botha became prime minister of a British Dominion with a population of 4 million Africans, 300,000 Coloureds, 150,000 Indians, and 1,275,000 Whites. 1 Egypt became a (notionally) independent monarchy in 1922, and the first experiments with filmmaking occurred there in the mid-1920s. When, beginning in the late 1950s, former French colonies began to achieve independence, one of the first actions of the many new governments was to set up a local film production monopoly, modeled on the lines of the Parisian Centre National de la Cinématographie and equipped with the requisite French-language acronym. The exception was Morocco, where the new government discovered a Moroccan film center the Centre Cinématogra phique Marocain (CCM) already in existence and fully functional. The center is still the focus of Moroccan film activity today. The first locally produced feature films tended to be made by foreigners. Feature production in South Africa between 1916 and 1925 was the product of an Anglo- American enterprise headed by U.S. businessman Isadore W. Schlesinger. Early film production in Egypt was largely the work of cosmopolitan expatriate elites in Cairo and Alexandria. In Algeria, Morocco, and Nigeria, the first locally produced features after independence were directed by Europeans or Americans. But gradually the directing role was taken over by African nationals. Egypt led the way with the founding of the locally financed Misr studios in the mid-1930s. This, as Kristina Bergmann aptly notes, was a moment of transformation for Egyptian films: at first financed by Lebanese and Greeks, shot by Italians, designed and acted by the French, films then became Egyptian. 2 Elsewhere we find the beginnings of indigenous film production occurring in the wake of independence: Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia in the 1960s; Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo ( ex- Zaire), Ethiopia, Gabon, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Other African countries gradually followed suit: Guinea- Bissau and Kenya in the 1980s; Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Tanzania, and Togo in the 1990s; and, most recently, the Central African Republic in Whatever the complexities of its funding and whatever foreign cultural influences may be present, these productions are usually clearly separable from those big budget foreign productions (from Raiders of the Lost Ark to The English Patient) which use Africa as a mere backdrop for non- African narratives. Only in South Africa before 1994 when the majority was denied a voice, and the attitudes,

18 Introduction 3 assumptions, and divisions of colonial rule persisted under the apartheid system did national film output remain inextricably linked, creatively as well as financially, with European and American interests, so that genuinely South African films and foreign films using South African locations are virtually indistinguishable. Under the colonial system, the prejudices of the colonizers made it impossible for them to imagine that an African could actually make any sort of film, let alone a feature film. The assumption, chillingly spelled out by Notcutt and Latham in their account of the 1930s Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment, was that, at best, intelligent young Africans could be trained to do much of the routine work of the darkroom and the sound studios, and even some of the semi- skilled work. 3 Twenty years later, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, born in Dahomey (now Benin) but later living and working in Senegal, was able to graduate from the major French film school, Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques ( IDHEC), in Paris, but that did not mean that, under existing French law, he could shoot film in Africa. As a result, Vieyra s first, collaboratively made, work had to be the 20-minute short Africa on Seine (1957), shot in Paris. But the racist assumptions of Notcutt and Latham had already been refuted in the 1920s by one of African cinema s most remarkable pioneers, Albert Samama Chikly ( ), a Tunisian Jew who was fascinated by Western technology and had arranged screenings of the Lumière cinematograph in Tunis in After shooting footage, from the Turkish side, of the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, Chikly became one of the dozen cameramen employed by the French Army film service (along with Abel Gance future creator of Napoléon and Louis Feuillade author-to-be of both the Fantômas and Judex series), filming at the front at Verdun in Subsequently, with the aid of his daughter Haydée, as actress, scriptwriter, and editor, he made a first fictional short, Zohra (1922), and then a second, feature- length, film, The Girl from Carthage / Aïn el- Ghezal (1924). 4 * * * This dictionary is concerned with fictional feature films (16mm or 35mm or shot on video and subsequently transferred to and distributed on film) made by Africans in Africa or in exile. Though television companies throughout the world help to co-finance films which have an initial commercial distribution in cinemas (and therefore deserve an entry here), I have not listed films shot purely for television screening what the French call téléfilms (though, where possible, I have mentioned significant television work in the filmmaker entries). Also omitted are purely video works of feature-length fiction. This is due in part to the logistical difficulties caused by the Nigerian situation (Pierre Barrot gives an estimate of seven thousand video features made between 1992 and the beginning of 2005). 5 But, in any case, these Nigerian home videos are destined not for public projection but for domestic consumption within a family context. Though technological developments and new promotional strategies are likely to lead to a totally different situation in the coming decade, at the present time the economic base for video work as well as its shooting and distribution strategies is totally different from that shaping any sort of true film activity. As the veteran filmmaker Eddie Ugbomah, who later turned to video, put it: a (video)

19 4 Dictionary of African Filmmakers film made with three million on Monday can bring you back ten million on Friday. What other activity can equal that in Nigeria? 6 The transition is fully reflected in the catalogues of the twenty- first edition of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC, 2006) and the twentieth edition of the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou ( FESPACO, 2007), not only by the continued strength and importance of 35mm filmmaking across the continent but also by the growing number of works, even by established filmmakers, which are digitally produced and reflect television formats: 52-minute documentaries and fictional works in a mini- series pattern of three 26-minute episodes. 7 In general I have omitted feature- length documentaries, but I have included in the filmmaker listings (though without indexing their films) half- a- dozen or so documentarists who have made truly significant contributions to African filmmaking, without mention of whom any overview of African film production would be deficient among them Simon Bright (Zimbabwe), Issa Genina (Morocco), Nana Mahomo (South Africa), Samba Félix Ndiaye (Senegal), and António Ole (Angola). A place has also been found in these chronologies for a handful of important featurelength documentaries to leave out Ahmed Rachedi s masterly Dawn of the Damned, the first feature produced in a newly independent Algeria, just because it is a compilation film would have been absurd. I have also included works in the growing category of docudramas or pseudo- documentaries (such as Mahamat Saleh Haroun s Bye-Bye Africa, chronicling a return to his native Chad), along with films which are treated as features by the organizers of African and Arab film festivals but which do not, strictly speaking, fulfill the conventional length requirements of a feature film (such as Abderrahmane Sissako s 61-minute meditation on the new millennium, Life on Earth). As far as individual filmmakers are concerned, the guiding principle of this dictionary is that every filmmaker is equal: black or white, Muslim or Christian, speaking English, Afrikaans, or Zulu. The dictionary is therefore concerned with everyone from Niazi Mostafa, who made more than a hundred features over a period of 50 years within the genre constraints of the Egyptian film industry, to Didier Ouenangare, whose co- directed debut feature, The Silence of the Forest (2003), is the first to be made by someone born in the Central African Republic. Of necessity, it ranges from Med Hondo, who struggled for many years and endured huge financial problems to create a masterpiece of African filmmaking, Sarraounia, 8 to Kamal Abou al- Ela, a respected Egyptian film editor, who was amazed to receive his sole co- directing credit for his work on Zohra (1947), when he had just shot the last few scenes after a dispute between the film s producer and star, Bahiga Hafez, and its director, Hussein Fawzi. 9 The listing here includes some filmmakers who have forged successful careers and others (perhaps the majority outside Egypt) whose work has been constantly frustrated by financial and production constraints. There are both those endowed with a genius for audio- visual organization and storytelling, and also a few whose hesitant efforts have never, it would seem, merited any sort of commercial release. In general, in compiling this dictionary, I have tried to

20 Introduction 5 be as flexible and inclusive as possible and I have adopted the very liberal definition used by festivals like the JCC in Tunis and FESPACO in Ouagadougou as to what constitutes an African film. The result, at the moment of going to press, is a list of over 5,400 feature films made by about 1,250 filmmakers from 37 countries. * * * A real problem has been how to classify the 1,250 or so filmmakers who have some claim to have produced an African film. I have in general used the nationality of the filmmaker as a shorthand for identifying and grouping films, since this is the way in which they are circulated in the film marketplace and listed at international film festivals. This has allowed me to include the work in France and in the French language of such exiled Algerian filmmakers as Merzak Allouache (though he is becoming more and more of a French filmmaker, viewing the Maghreb from outside). Also included is the entire feature production of both Khaled al- Hagar, whose second, semi- autobiographical, feature, Room to Rent, is omitted from official Egyptian listings, since it is a film shot and produced in London and uses the English language, and Youri Nasrallah, whose 2005 double feature The Gate of the Sun is technically a French film. I have similarly included both feature-length diploma films shot at European film schools, such as Elaine Proctor s On the Wire, her graduation film at the National Film and Television School at Beaconsfield in the United Kingdom, and the work in exile of such young Nigerian filmmakers as Newton I. Aduaka (Rage, 2000, and Ezra, 2006), Branwen Okpako (Valley of the Innocent, 2002), and Adaora Nwandu (Rag Tag, 2006). But there is a problem in that certain films regarded as nationally significant in Africa have not been made by Africans. Even after the founding of the Misr studios in Egypt (where the first feature to be produced, Weddad, was directed by the German Fritz Kramp), foreigners have continued to play a part in Egyptian filmmaking. Surveying the postwar era ( ), Samir Farid notes that the list of mainstream Egyptian directors of the period included Palestinians, Hungarians, and Italians. 10 Subsequently Japanese, American, and Lebanese names figure among the directors of officially listed Egyptian films. In many of the newly independent African states of the 1950s and 1960s, local production often began with feature films directed by outsiders. This was the case in Algeria, Tunisia, and Nigeria, for example. Throughout the history of South African filmmaking, South African producers have imported English and American directors for their own productions or been involved, as co- producers, in films directed by foreigners. Thus the listings by South African critics and historians include routine films by British directors such as Ken Annakin, Harry Watt, Cy Enfield, Val Guest, Dan Chaffrey, Peter Collinson, Peter Hunt, and J. Lee Thompson, many of which, from a UK perspective, would seem to be essentially British films shot on location. The problem is aggravated in the case of South Africa by the fact that three of the films which are key to any definition of filmmaking in South Africa were in fact directed by foreigners. The silent Afrikaner epic De Voortekkers (1916) was produced by the South African based American businessman Schlesinger and directed by Harold Shaw, an American imported from London. The first South African feature