Africa’s ‘Cannes moment’ opens with tribute to Malian great Souleymane Cissé

Having celebrated the last gasp of Europe’s decrepit aristocracies in “Jeanne du Barry”, the controversial curtain-raiser starring Johnny Depp, the world’s glitziest film gathering got down to business on Wednesday with a flurry of movies big and small, new and old, hailing from all corners of the world. 

In the flagship Palme d’Or race, the 2018 Japanese laureate Hirokazu Kore-eda went Rashomon-style in “Monster”, about a young boy’s disturbing behaviour, while France’s Catherine Corsini hit the red carpet for her Corsican-set family drama “Homecoming”, which has been dogged by controversy amid allegations of harassment during filming. 

Down in the entrails of Cannes’ gargantuan Palais des Festivals, dealers were already proclaiming a bumper edition for the all-important Cannes Film Market, the prime indicator of the industry’s state of health, with a record 13,500 delegates already registered and Asian firms returning en masse after a prolonged Covid-induced hiatus.

Along the Riviera town’s palm tree-lined Croisette, there were screenings of movies from Portugal, Malaysia, Britain and Cape Verde, including Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City”, an exploration of the Nazi takeover of Amsterdam during World War II and this year’s longest film, stretching over more than four hours.

Meanwhile, festivalgoers got the Nouvelle Vague-nostalgia treatment with a special 60th anniversary screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic “Le Mépris” (Contempt), one of the first movies about movies, a devastatingly beautiful portrayal of cinema as a corrupting world of crooked producers and screenwriters who pimp their wives to assist their career – with a soundtrack that stays with you forever. 

Africa’s Cannes moment 

This year’s festival sees Cannes break its undistinguished record for female directors vying for the Palme d’Or, with seven women among the 21 filmmakers in the race. Female directors also account for the two African entries in the Palme competition, part of a sizeable and youthful contingent from the continent that has fuelled talk of African cinema finally enjoying its “Cannes moment”.  

Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania will get her first red-carpet premiere on Friday for her part-feature, part-documentary entry “Four Daughters”, about a mother’s efforts to find her daughters lured by the jihad in Syria. The next day, Senegalese newcomer Ramata-Toulaye Sy will present her tale of tortured love “Banel & Adama”, this year’s only first feature in the race for the Palme d’Or. 

The selection of Ben Hania and Sy points to a sterling edition for African film, four years after French-Algerian director Mati Diop won a surprise Grand Prix award in Cannes for her debut feature “Atlantique”. It also suggests a form of belated recognition for a continent that has still only won a single Palme d’Or, back in 1975, for Algerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s “Chronique des Années de Braise” (Chronicle of the Years of Fire). 

Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, dedicated to emerging talent, will screen four other African entries. Moroccan helmers Asmae El Moudir (“The Mother of All Lies”) and Kamal Lazraq (“Hounds”) set their gaze on Casablanca’s everyday life and underworld, while Congolese hip-hop artist Baloji tells the tale of a child sorcerer in his maiden film, “Omen”. Among the most eagerly awaited entries is Mohamed Kordofani’s “Goodbye Julia”, which explores the roots of the chaos now sweeping Sudan. 

There’s also a Midnight Screening of Algeria-set “Omar la Fraise” (The King of Algiers) by French-Algerian director Elias Belkeddar, starring Reda Kateb as an exiled gangster trying to get back in the game. 

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African entries are equally prominent in this year’s parallel selections, the Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week and Acid sidebars, with films from Cameroon (“Mambar Pierrette”), Tunisia (“Machtat”), Guinea Bissau (“Nome”) and Egypt (“Eissa”) – the latter two helping to broaden the spectrum, which otherwise leans heavily towards French-speaking African countries.  

A tribute to Cissé 

The abundance and diversity of movies on offer is a source of “pride and confidence” for Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, the French actress of Guinean origin who officiates as the “godmother” of this year’s Africa Pavilion in Cannes, a beehive of activity nestled at the heart of the festival’s International Village. 

“I think a lot of people are still not familiar with African cinema and its diversity,” said Diallo Sagna, who stars in Corsini’s “Homecoming”, as she attended a cocktail party for the pavilion’s launch. “They will be able to discover new forms of moviemaking, new facets of film.” 

Seldom has a film opened greater perspectives than 1987’s “Yeelen” (The Light), the spellbinding masterpiece that instantly turned Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé into a darling of art-house cinema in the West. 

A deeply spiritual work rooted in the oral traditions of precolonial Africa, “Yeelen” was hailed as an emancipating breakthrough for cinema on the continent, a reinvention of film as an African art form. It won the Jury Prize in Cannes, in a first for the continent.  

For all its mystical symbolism, Cissé’s masterpiece remained firmly anchored in reality, carrying a potent political message that recalled his earlier, social-realist works, including his 1975 maiden feature “Den Muso” (The Young Girl), a film indebted to his training in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. 

“Den Muso” told the harrowing tale of the rape and subsequent ostracising of a young girl in Bamako, heralding Cissé’s then-pioneering criticism of patriarchal structures of domination (which resulted in a stint in jail for the director and a ban on the movie in his home country). It got a rare screening on Tuesday at the start of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, a prelude to the Carrosse d’Or award ceremony. 

‘Cinema is about reaching out to others’ 

Addressing the audience after the screening, Cissé said he chose to make his female protagonist mute as a symbol of the silencing of women. When asked whether things had improved in his native Mali, he said women’s emancipation had made only limited progress since his first works. 

“Male domination is so deeply rooted it will take something radical to really change things – in Mali or anywhere in the world,” he said. “Whether it’s male domination, white domination, or subordination to capitalism, injustice is the real outrage. All my films have within them a revolt against injustice.” 

In an interview with FRANCE 24 earlier this year, during the Fespaco film festival in Ouagadougou, the Malian director spoke of his desire to see African cinema “emerge from the bottle and travel far and wide, to places where it never occurs to people to watch films from our continent”. 

It’s a theme he repeated in Cannes, even as he hailed the record number of African films in this year’s line-up – “all the more so because many are directed by women”. 

Cissé lamented a lingering “contempt” and a reluctance to distribute African films in the West. As a result, he said, “we are still not on a level playing field, which is wrong, because cinema is precisely about reaching out to others.”  

“Cinema can help people acquire a better understanding of our continent,” he added. “Denying people access to the movies will only fuel misunderstandings.”