This year, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) had only a handful of films from African filmmakers, a difference so marked that the festival director Orwa Nyrabia made a comment on it at the press conference leading to its opening.
I was there at the festival—and indeed, not too many films came from African filmmakers made the official selection. But Africa was present in other ways, notably in work by filmmakers from outside of the continent.
For instance, the festival invited filmmaker Johan Grimonprez as its guest of honour, and that meant screening some of his work. His latest is Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a gloriously jazzy project on the UN, the US, Belgium, and the CIA’s misadventures in 1960s Congo. I was happy to revisit it after seeing it at Sundance where it premiered earlier in the year.
Below are four short commentaries, as gleaned from a near-fortnight at one of world’s biggest venues dedicated to nonfiction filmmaking.
1. Africa needs more documentaries
Anyone from the continent attending the big fiction festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance etc—probably dreams of African films occupying spots in the competition section. One gets the same feeling at IDFA. There are so many facets to the African life that deserve their day on the big screen.
Of course, some of these projects will be screened only within the African countries responsible for them, but there are opportunities out there in the world for ambitious African documentary filmmakers.
IDFA screened a documentary about a Japanese journalist’s sexual assault and a documentary about a man’s funny relationship with his own name. There was a documentary about a mother’s alcoholism and a mostly heartwarming story about a famous poet and his daughter. It would be a wholesome development if the variousness of these stories is reflected in African documentary filmmaking.
2. Too much funding goes to African dysfunction
After attending Cannes and Sundance this year, I wrote elsewhere that African joy was missing at those festivals. Well, it is pretty much the same thing at IDFA. I suspect it’s the same pattern at play. The success of one type of story reinforces itself over and again.
This year, IDFA screened the East-Africa set Battle for Laikipia, which is about climate change and its consequences. There was a short project, which began life as an installation, on the struggles of commercial motorcycle riders in Nigeria. The lack of electricity in a part of the Congo is the subject of another documentary. And so on.
These are projects that have received funding from western bodies and long may it continue. But it can’t be a terrible thing if some of that funding—a fraction really—is put to some other thematic concern. Who knows what great projects fails to get funding when African dysfunction dominates international screens?
3. There’s room for experimentation
In one conversation during IDFA, a programmer lamented the lack of innovation from some African filmmakers. The problem, it seems, is that these filmmakers are much too aware of the European gaze and try to cater to it. But in doing so, some essential element in the stories they seek to tell goes missing.
It is an understandable problem—sometimes the best way to succeed is to copy what has succeeded. Nonetheless, for a continent that hasn’t quite been represented adequately on the biggest of cinematic stages, it is worth remembering that that scarcity is currency. This is a good time for African directors to be innovative. Someday, one hopes, there’ll be a glut of projects from Africa. But until then, African filmmakers have a license to thrill in surprising, exciting ways.
4. Some of the best stories about Africa are made by non-Africans
One of the films I was quite impressed by at Cannes this year came from the French filmmaker Boris Lojkine. His film, then titled The Story of Souleymane, follows an African immigrant in Paris. We follow him as he hustles daily, while preparing for an interview with French authorities. The story is told with a fine sensitivity, even though Lojkine is white.
In Amsterdam, two documentaries reminded me of Lojkine’s film. Both projects—On The Border and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat—are by European filmmakers. They are about Africa and its place in the world, and are important in understanding the continent’s past and present, especially in relation to the west.
There’ll probably be those who’d say that westerners shouldn’t be telling non-western stories. But it would be unreasonable to dismiss every project of that nature. In any case, the stories told in both films are not just about Africa.
Gerald Igor Hauzenberger and Gabriela Schild’s On The Border covers the upending of the local economy of Agadez, a city in Niger, by a Europe worried about it being a passageway for illegal immigrants. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat spends a lot of time on Patrice Lumumba’s murder—as orchestrated by the actions and inactions of western powers. Neither story is the preserve of African storytellers.
Grimonprez is Belgian, Hauzenberger and Schild are Austrians, but their work says something important about Africa’s history in a manner that reflects on its present. It would be a loss if these films didn’t exist.
The dream is for African filmmakers to be able to attract resources that encourage them to tell stories of a similar ambition—but that is no reason to root against those who can already tell those stories.
