“There is no single African gaze”: how our Pan-African film season came together

Tigritudes, an illuminating Pan-African season currently running at BFI Southbank, has been curated by two prolific and accomplished filmmakers and programmers. Between them Dyana Gaye and Valérie Osouf have assembled an embarrassment of on-screen riches that will challenge preconceived ideas of what Africa was, is and can become. The range of movies on show is eye-opening.

Osouf spent nine years in Senegal and made her debut as a director in 1996 with Sans commentaire: Le pays ou l’on n’arrive jamais, a thought-provoking documentary about people deported under the Pasqua/Debré regime. Her subsequent work has centred largely on history, culture and politics, both in France and Africa, with films such as Cameroun: Autopsie d’une indépendence (2008) and Sissako, par-delà les territoires (2017), a profile of the Mauritanian-born Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, winning great acclaim. Osouf is also a journalist and teaches at the Beijing Film Academy.

A truly global event, Tigritudes had its first run at the Forum des Images in Paris in 2022 before moving to many cities around the world, including Dakar and Saint-Louis in Senegal, Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, Marrakesh in Morocco, Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lagos in Nigeria, and Nairobi in Kenya. Tigritudes has brought Africa to the movies and Africans to movie theatres.   

Tigritudes is defined by great eclecticism. Was that always part of the plan?

Valérie Osouf: This was our desire from the beginning. Dyana and I share a love of film, but we also have individual tastes, so we wanted to complement each other. The post-colonial division of the continent is still very much felt, between the Maghreb, Francophone, Anglophone and Portuguese-speaking African countries, so it was very important for us to really dismantle that kind of segmentation, and to push back against any of the prevailing stereotypes that people have of African cinema. And we wanted to reach a different type of audience, and be as broad as possible, and as inclusive as we could.

It’s a hugely ambitious programme. How much preparation was involved?

We watched 1,200 films, including shorts, over three years, and the programme was already in our hearts and minds through all the films we’ve watched together and separately over the past 25 years. There were some countries where we didn’t know about the cinema history, so we contacted people who knew people who knew people who sent us links; people reacted well to the project. We tried to get the balance right, by having films from the African diaspora as well as Africa – and a wide range of documentaries, fiction, experimental films, films for children, low budget films, shorts. The whole programme is 128 films from 42 different countries.

I have already seen a few excellent shorts. Does this format have a particular importance for you and Dyana?   

The thing is, a lot of great filmmakers don’t get the opportunity to direct any features. So if you exclude shorts you exclude 80% of what’s being produced on the continent. If I take Congo-Brazzaville, we are showing Sébastien Kamba’s 1965 film Kaka-Yo (28 minutes), but there are hardly any films produced in that country, so if you want it to be represented it was obvious to us that we just had to screen it. What’s also great about short films is that they can articulate something people were thinking in a very direct way. As for me I always do shorts between features. I just directed a short 10 days ago. Some stories deserve 10 hours and some 10 minutes, and I don’t put one above the other.

Are there particular themes running across the films?

Yes, because a lot of the films we’ve programmed are among the very first films produced by newly independent countries, so a lot of them embody hope and have political agendas. We always chose films that have an aesthetic and poetic quality and artistic value. But, yes, the theme of emancipation runs through the programme, and the theme of the Black body runs through the programme, and also how you reinvent relationships between male and female, adult and child, rich and poor.

Would you agree that Bye Bye Africa (1999) is a key film in Tigritudes, as it broaches a timeless, universal subject: the difficult relationship between a returning expatriate and their homeland?

We both loved Bye Bye Africa (by Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) because it is really a reflection on the nature of cinema, a reflection on the conditions in which you make films, and an important reflection on politics all at the same time.

John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) is a seminal work in the history of Black British cinema. How did you learn about it?

I saw it a very long time ago. About 15 years ago I wanted to make a film, Guns of Brixton, a documentary looking at 30 years after the Brixton uprising. I met Don Letts, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah, and I was researching the subject in depth. That’s when I came across John’s Handsworth Songs, which has since become one of my favourite films. I always followed John’s work with great interest, but when we screened Handsworth Songs in Paris nobody knew it!

We invited [Saint Omer director] Alice Diop to discuss it and she was surprised that she didn’t know the film, precisely because of the segmentation I mentioned earlier. People now know John’s work more in France, in the arts sector. He has been invited to the Pompidou Centre, but at the time British and French culture were totally separate, although things have moved on a bit since then.

Looking at the programme, what really comes across is the immense stylistic and cultural diversity of Africa. There are many different kinds of African film rather than African film per se. Is that part of the season’s raison d’être?

Yes, I think that’s really why we’re doing Tigritudes in the first place. When you look at the films made in the 70s, they are part of a global conversation. Africa is really not in a bubble. Some filmmakers have different aesthetics and sensibilities. They cannot be reduced to one thing, the same thing. There is no single African gaze. There are no tigers in Africa, that’s why we call the programme Tigritudes. It’s about people who are different from each other, being able to speak as equals at the same table.

Was it hard to secure the rights to some movies and find good prints?

There were some films we wanted to screen where filmmakers were their own producers and had to sell their rights, which were sold again and then again and again. The chain became tangled up. Some very bad deals were made. And some prints have totally disappeared, which is really sad. Djamila Sahraoui directed eight or nine films, and they have disappeared. Some films from the 80s, shot on video, have also gone.

One thing that really stands out for me is the enormous range of languages spoken across all the movies shown at Tigritudes. Did you want to make a point about the linguistic riches of Africa?

Well, there are 6,000 languages that are living languages in the world. Among those 6,000 there are 1,000 in Papua New Guinea and 3,000 in central Africa. Each month one language dies, and when that happens so many things die with it in terms of knowledge. So Africa is like a repository of human knowledge. In Congo alone there are 450 languages. It’s inspiring to know some of these are being heard at Tigritudes.

Tigritudes: A Pan-African Film Cycle is currently at BFI Southbank, Tate Modern, The Garden Cinema and on BFI Player.