5663 spectators in six days and 18 films, 2703 of whom attended the special school showings, 1394 more spectators than in 2005, including 850 school children: the 4th edition of the Festival des Cinémas d'Afrique du Pays d'Apt, November 7 - 12, was a complete success. The youngsters' rallying had something to do with it.
Youngsters are Apt's oil: the festival's only competition - totally honorific - is a high school jury that entirely dedicates itself to the exercise after class, this year supervised by Jean-Pierre Daniel, Head of the Alhambra cinema in Marseille. (1) They set the tone but most impressive of all is the mobilization of 90 high schools and junior high schools classes from in and around Apt. It is quite something to walk the high school corridors in the middle of the festival and hear the conversations revolving around cinema. It is quite something to sneak into a room where five classes are gathered and feel their quasi-religious attentiveness to the "film lessons" given by Abderrahmane Sissako or Sarah Maldoror who agreed this year to participate for three days in order to meet the students around their films. It is quite something to share the emotion of the young jury who were lucky enough to spend an evening with Abderrahmane Sissako talking about films, but also that of all these youth impressed by the depth of the debates after his films. It is something to be given the chance, as I was once again, to debate with the students, after the projections or in their classrooms, and to hear them vibrating - all ages, origins or background together - with the films they had the chance to discover. It is quite something to see the directors' emotion before students who sometimes even offered them an illustrated poem as a souvenir!
Naturally, there are certain prerequisites. First, it takes an open-minded headteacher ready to invest 100%. A day dedicated to high school students was organized on Tuesday, the first day of the festival. This meant that the school shut down for the day and that the 441 students came to the cinema to watch two films, each in presence of directors Sarah Maldoror and Abderrahmane Sissako! It would not have been possible without the support of the region. The festival asked for it and got it. Teachers also need to be motivated. Around twenty of them came two weeks earlier on a Saturday, unpaid, to attend a training day I hosted on African films and the films shown at the festival. A go-between was also needed at the high school: Danielle Bruel, representative of the "Le Goût de lire en pays d'Apt", an association for pedagogical support made incredible efforts to mobilize everybody. But it would not work without the quality of the team's very selective programming lead by the seasoned film-buff Dominique Wallon, ex-director of the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie). Or without the discussions following the 20 public showings and the 22 school screenings with the directors: Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Samba Félix N'Diaye and Angèle Diabang Brenera who came to present their films, while Rwandese journalist Madeleine Mukamabano and Ivory Coast actress Naky Sy Savané also spoke, and the reviewer Michel Amarger and myself moderated the other debates.
The youngsters saw the films at the schools screenings, talked about them at home, which encouraged their parents to go and see them in order to discuss them with their children. By word of mouth, the festival even sold out the afternoon showings and people were turned down in the evening for six showings on the main screen. It has to be specified that Apt is a town with barely 12 000 inhabitants and one three-screen movie theater at its disposal. Like many historic theaters, it has one of those names given in the days when cinema was like the circus games which gathered the people: the Caesar.
As years go by, the festival is building up a loyal audience - albeit limited - and mobilizes more than many big functions. It quietly shows that, if properly accompanied, African films are a hit. The audience wants more, really regrets missing showings, and likes to be surprised by films that are sometimes puzzling, stays on for the debates in order to better react or grasp the complexities. "Six days to understand contemporary Africa's situation and spirit," writes Marie Prache, a sixth form science student and member of the high school jury, in her account of the festival. This "window on another culture", she goes on, "is an opportunity to discover so many points of view on Africa, too often reduced to clichés", before concluding with this wonderful statement: "A festival to dream and think. To get in touch and get involved."
It is symptomatic that the high school jury awarded Nacer Khemir's Bab'Aziz its prize (jointly with Daratt by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) a film that some reviews and not the least qualified as abstruse. Did the youths understand it better? The film is one of those that impressed the festival the most; the jury was on the same wavelength as the public. The festival's moderators presented the approach of the film quoting Nacer Khemir: "to wash the dirty face of my father, Islam". The film thus asks us to accept to undertake a journey. That is to say, to accept confronting alterity. Perhaps a festival's exceptional nature isn't amiss to enable young people to take into account a film's part of mystery when they are often used only to easily consumed contents. Nevertheless, only school can lead youngsters who stuff themselves with only pop-corn films to this meeting: they don't often have any other places for this, no other opportunities.
This is the festival's aim, like school's: to make this meeting possible. It does not necessarily happen. I was invited to talk with different classes on the school's premises. In general, the discussion was lively and exciting. But once, with two so-called "tough" classes together, it was a struggle: I tried to break the silences, to overcome their reticence to speak out. There is, of course, a time during adolescence when kids are not too keen on talking in front of others. But there was something else. "It sucks. I prefer action films", said a pupil. Compared with American entertainment films and television, what do African films weigh? It is useless to think that we can restore the balance: such a power struggle is impossible to reverse. And in any case, pleasure is also a criterion that must be taken into account. It would be a complete illusion to believe that a handful of films will reverse the trend. That they would suddenly educate people's outlooks. We discussed a lot more with this pupil, linked the film experience to our own lives, discussed how films talked about us and opened us to the others.
What, indeed, made me take the first step? What was the turning point which made the desire to understand more important than the desire to consume? I remember. I was young, about 12, I was watching a film on TV: John Ford's How green was my valley. I cried with emotion. The next day, I rushed to find Richard Llewelyn's book after which the film was titled. It was a paperback edition. I devoured it. Then I devoured others, other books, other films. I learnt in an effort to experience that feeling again.
I saw this decisive film a little while ago, all happy to chance upon it. Disappointment. I did not feel what I felt as a child. But I understood that I had found in it the image of what I was cruelly lacking: a father figure, a homelike community, roots. I understood, why I responded to Ford's generosity, humanism, poetry and lyricism.
I had met a work. It was the right time: I could let it in and accept it. It enabled me to move on. Even if I have forgotten most of them and would not claim this film and book as my references now, they left an indelible mark in me which comes down to a few images but above all a strong emotion. "One can be forced to learn, but one cannot be forced to be touched", writes Alain Bergala in L'Hypothèse Cinéma, this "little treatise on film transmission at school and elsewhere", a remarkable book that guides this reflection. The meeting with art is individual and cannot be planned. But when it happens, it is decisive.
It is this possible meeting that film at school can enable, a meeting which when repeated and when articulating works together gradually builds up taste. And because the ceremonial nature of the movie theatre encourages concentration and communion in the dark school, children's presence is a big event for all which needs to be endlessly repeated. Films still need to be brought within the school walls too, but in keeping with the work of the teachers who took part in the festival, a global emulation and the meeting with directors, that is to say, another type of meeting again. When, for two hours, the pupils remain completely focused on their "cinema lesson", which is none other than a question & answer session on the filmmakers' experiences and their approach as creative artists, they have an incredible opportunity to realize what creating means. The films are thus no longer answers but questions that each of them asks themselves with a creative artist. A film is a question that the director shares with the audience. And even if it is an entire crew that makes a film, involving a whole industry, one person only thought about it and decided how he/she was going to pose that question. Provided he/she was given the freedom to be an author, knowing it is always a negotiation.
It is because it brings us works that are sometimes demanding, or at any rate uncommon, that the festival is a salutary riposte. A riposte to the communitarians' discourses and practices wielded today by the youths of immigrant backgrounds angry at discrimination but whose radicalism is opposed to both the values of their own families' original milieu and school's attempts to be egalitarian. A riposte to subjugating films that make money by pandering to the basest impulses. A riposte to the generalized ugliness and stupidity on TV.
During our conversations with the students, the films were not studied in an academic way. The aim was not to explain them, but, thanks to the meetings with their authors, to listen to them as you would closely observe a painter's work. The aim was, therefore, as Bergala again points out, "to learn how to become a spectator who feels the emotions of the work itself." The films were not addressed according to their topic or grammar but according to what brings them to life. Isn't that how a critical mind is nurtured? (2)
It is in this respect that the relationship to Africa was essential. It facilitates an experience rather than didacticism. Because it lives in the films and also in each and every one of us, whether of immigrant origin or, necessarily, part of the common History with the Continent. The discussions with the classes quickly brought up the question of colonialism, the images that persist and their translation into racism and discrimination. Because not a single African film can ignore it, from Bamako to Aimé Césaire, Le Masque des Mots, Sometimes in April to Nos Altres.
An experience too because all African film confronts us with a bracing otherness, makes us see the degree to which reality resists prejudice and simplification. It provokes us and destabilizes our received ideas. Inhabited by the tragedy but also the continent's vitality, it is looking for the paths of a new hope for everybody.
Youth are even more sensitive to this because they can address their anxieties regarding what concerns them the most: their future. Given that, as Bergala writes, "what speaks the most to the child is not necessarily what he/she is used to hearing."
Adults are just as sensitive to this pedagogy of the gaze. This transpired in every debate but also during those privileged moments when the enthusiastic public came to meet filmmakers in the morning intimacy of the Vélo-Théâtre everyday at 11 o'clock, for debates animated by Michel Amarger. This is no doubt also where the quality of this intimate and committed festival lies: in enabling adults to find their childhood souls again.
Olivier Barlet
Translated from French by Sutarni Riesenmey.
Photos by Danielle Bruel.
