Film fest showcases Africa’s best

Winnipeggers are sometimes accused of living within the Perimeter, meaning a visit to Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, might be out of the question for your weekend travel plans.

But the African Film Festival in Manitoba — which kicked off Monday and runs to Sept. 20 — gives local audiences three feature-length opportunities to embrace stories from a nation that’s widely considered the home of African cinema.

Chief among these is Katanga, a tense re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish play told in the Fulah language. Directed and written by Dani Kouyaté, the film was the winner of the the Etalon D’or — the top prize — at last year’s FESPACO, a biennial celebration of Pan-African film and television held in Ouagadougou.

Starring Mahamadi Nana and Prosper Compaore, the film also features a striking, late-career performance by Rasmané Ouédraogo, who starred in the Palme d’Or winner Tilaï — in which a man returns to his village to find his fiancee has become his father’s second wife — in 1990.

One of the primary thrills offered by the festival — founded in 2017 by Winnipeg’s Ben Akoh — is the chance to engage with global cinema and interrogate the limitations of the Western gaze: there are so many more stars to be seen than those brought to light by projectors in mainstream North American multiplexes.

For Akoh, a tech entrepreneur who lived in Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa and Senegal before moving to Winnipeg in the mid-2000s, that’s a driving force in keeping the festival thrumming.

“Stories have the power to connect people who have never met, to bridge cultures that may seem far apart and to remind us of our shared humanity,” he said last Wednesday at a news conference announcing the lineup for a festival that promotes both continental output and work made by members of African diasporic communities.

That means that films like Fouroulou — about a bright boy’s experiences with poverty in rural Algeria — will screen in a program that also includes works such as the Canadian Black Screen Award-winning Lleyton, a short about a chance encounter with a homeless man, co-written by Toronto’s Kosa Akaraiwe and Adrian Wallace.

Locally made work will also get its share of the spotlight as part of the festival’s second annual Manitoba Gaze program, which includes 30 provincial shorts made by filmmakers from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

One of those films, Classic Mark — screening Friday at 5 p.m. in the WAG’s Muriel Richardson Auditorium — was produced by the festival’s filmmaking collective, including director Mena Granger, producer Nnadozie Ekeocha, production designer Yemi Onobote and actors Zubeir Ture, Tayo Adekoya, David Milejszo and Isaac Yunanov.

Executive producers are Akoh, festival board member Taisa Monastyrski and Winnipeg Film Group staffer Ben Williams, a founder of The 48 film festival.

A story about a would-be convenience store robbery that’s complicated by shared relationships, the film exemplifies the professional development side of the festival, which earlier this summer launched an acting program to help casting directors source local on-screen talent.

Since June, the Black Actors Foundry has offered free performance training to members looking to build their on-screen resumes.

“The foundry has been on our minds for many years,” Akoh says. “Any time calls for Black actors are made, (filmmakers) always go to Toronto to try to fill them, or to the United States. And we think that’s an opportunity right there for us.”

Akoh says that this year’s event — which features screenings at the WAG, at Université de St. Boniface and at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain — is the largest in its nine-year history, with 60 films programmed for the week.

A full program, plus ticket information, is available at am-fm.ca

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The festival also coincides with Winnipeg’s hosting this weekend of the fifth annual National Black Canadians Summit, an event co-founded by former governor general Michaëlle Jean and her husband, the filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond.

Jean, an accomplished filmmaker in her own right, has also served in the past as a keynote speaker for Film Training Manitoba’s SWIFT — supporting women in film trades — conference; this year’s SWIFT will feature a keynote address by actress Pam Grier, an icon of African American cinema, on Oct. 24 at the University of Winnipeg.

At the Black Canadians Summit — which runs Sept. 18-20 at various locations across the city — politics, human rights and arts and culture will be discussed by accomplished speakers and industry professionals.

In a Saturday-afternoon breakout session for summit attendees, CBC host and Winnipeg-raised recording artist Odario Williams will discuss new pathways for Black Canadian artmaking with panelists Alex Sannie, the manager of Manitoba Music’s Black Professionals in Music program; program co-ordinator Tomiwa Omolayo, who performs Afrobeats music as Tommyphyll; Joy Loewen, the vice-president of industry development for the Canadian Media Fund; and classical singer and author Measha Brueggergosman-Lee.

More information on the summit is available at blackcanadiansummit.ca.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca