Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Celebrated director and Cannes winner highlight 18th African film festival

Photos and story by James Hill

It attracts more than 4,500 film-goers to a month-long schedule of cinema. The 18th edition of Portland Community College’s Cascade Festival of African Films commences in February with a Cannes Film Festival award-winner and a visit by one of Cameroon’s most influential filmmakers.

The Cascade Festival of African Films, organized entirely by volunteers, is offered to the public free of charge and has shown more than 240 films since its inception in 1991. Venues include Room 104 of the Moriarty Arts and Humanities Building at PCC’s Cascade Campus (705 N. Killingsworth St), Hollywood Theatre (4122 N.E. Sandy Blvd.) and McMenamins Kennedy School Theatre (5736 N.E. 33rd Ave.).

This year’s month-long event, starting Friday, Feb. 1, and running through to Saturday, March 1, will open with a screening of Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb’s “Days of Glory,” the hard-hitting winner of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Exceptional both as a war film and as a study in colonial exploitation, “Days of Glory” (7 p.m., Feb. 1, at the Hollywood Theatre) follows a group of North Africans who find themselves in Europe during World War II, fighting to liberate a country that holds them in colonial servitude. In the second week of the festival, Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Téno will make a visit. One of Africa’s premiere documentary filmmakers, Téno will show two of his recent films, “The Colonial Misunderstanding,” (8:15 p.m., Feb. 7, Cascade Campus) and “Alex’s Wedding” (7:30 p.m., Feb. 7, Cascade Campus). He will answer questions about his work and share insights into colonialism, neo-colonialism, and African filmmaking.

Téno, who is currently a visiting artist at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is known for his insights into Africa’s colonial past and post-colonial present. He was born in 1954 in Famleng, Cameroon. In 1977, he moved to France – where he still lives – and studied audiovisual communication, receiving a master’s degree from the University of Valenciennes. After working in journalism for a time, he managed to interview director Ousmane Sembène. The veteran director, impressed by Téno’s questions, asked him why he was not making films himself. Téno soon took the director’s advice to heart and began making short documentaries and fiction shorts.

This year’s event brings to Portland more than 20 award-winning African films from every region of the continent. Films will be shown on Friday and Saturday evenings with those films repeated in Thursday afternoon matinees. There will be documentary films on Thursday evenings and on four Saturday afternoons, including a Saturday afternoon Family Film Day program. Each evening screening will be followed by a discussion session led by individuals from the area shown in that evening’s film or by individuals with expert knowledge of the region.

For a complete schedule, visit the official Web site: www.africanfilmfestival.org.

2008 Cascade Festival of African Films Highlights

Family Film Day will be held at the Kennedy School at 2 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 16, at the McMenamins Kennedy School. Films on this day will appeal to younger audiences and will include movies from Ghana and Zimbabwe. Artist and storyteller Baba Wagué Diakité of Mali again will preface the films with a traditional story from West Africa.

New to the film festival this year is StudentFest – a matinee program on Thursday, Feb. 14. StudentFest focuses on films with special appeal to high school and college students. The event will feature “The Wooden Box” from South Africa and “Masaï: The Rain Warriors” from Kenya.

This year’s Thursday night documentary series will feature films by Jean-Marie Téno; movies about Sierra Leone; a powerful film about Darfur; and Sandy Cioffi’s provocative new film about the African oil industry, “Sweet Crude.” The final two weeks of the Festival feature Saturday matinee programs featuring subjects of special appeal: the “Nollywood” films of Nigeria, the U.S. “race” films made for African-American audiences and a profile of an unlikely women’s soccer league in Muslim Zanzibar.

Women Filmmakers Week will highlight the work of Sandy Cioffi plus a variety of films by women directors, including films from Burkina Faso, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. Of special interest will be the presentation from Cioffi, director of “Sweet Crude,” a provocative new film about the oil industry’s impact on the people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

The film festival will have a tribute to Ousmane Sembène, who died in June at the age of 84. Senegal’s Sembène, generally considered “The Father of African Film,” and his films have been the inspiration of the Cascade Festival of African Films from its very beginning. The festival, which has shown nearly all of his films, will commemorate his contribution to African cinema by dedicating the first Saturday of the Festival (Feb. 2) with three of his work – “Borom Sarrett,” “La Noire de,” and “Guelwaar.”