Filmmaker Jean-Pierre
Bekolo will be the keynote speaker at the African Film and Politics Conference organized by
the Africa Media Centre at the University of
Westminster in London.
Bekoko will screen his latest film The President, which will be screened on the Sunday Nov. 10th, with a Q and A with the director afterward, and which criticizes both his country’s
dictatorship as well as Western cinematic conventions, as a case study for his lecture about “making
movies from a mental and physical place.”
Along with Bekolo, writer, academic and filmmaker Imruh Bakari, who is the former Festival
Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, and currently a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at
the University of Winchester, will also be giving a keynote speech as well.
In addition, there will also be a presentation and screening by Daniela Ricci of her new film, Creation in Exile, which deals with
five major filmmakers: Newton Aduaka, John
Akomfrah, Haile Gerima, Dani Kouyaté
and Jean Odoutan who are, in her
words, “currently in exile,” and follows their personal and artistic lives
and how they echo sequences in their films, “through the gazes of these
filmmakers, in search of harmony between different cultures, masks fall and
myths are smashed.”
As for the conference, which will take place on Saturday and Sunday Nov. 9-10, its aim is to explore the African film
industry, which is itself ridden with
tension, power and politics.
More on the conference:
“However,
there are questions about how power and politics has been included in African
film. Which African political story is told through films? Whose voice is
represented? Who speaks on behalf of whom? To what extent have films expanded
identities, power and political relations? In what way has politics influenced
film production, distribution, exhibition and consumption in Africa?”
The conference goals are to “debate
issues of politics, ideology, power and diversity in African film industry… how
broadly-defined politics relates to generational, gender, ethnic, racial,
traditional/modernity and language issues in African films.”
A schedule for the conference can be found HERE.
If
you are interested in attending, contact Jane Thorburn at [email protected].
Special h/t to Candace Allen
