Caravanes Productions

Tahar Cheriaa: Under the Shadow of the Baobab documents the career of one of the core fathers of Pan-Africanism and founder of Africa’s first film festival, the Carthage Film Festival. After Tunisian independence, Cheriaa used all his energy to bring the first authentic images of postcolonial Africa to broader audiences. The film depicts Cheriaa’s ideas and projects, with interviews and archival material creating a complete portrait of the man and his fight for both Sub-Saharan African cinema and African cinema as a whole.

Between 1983 and 1987, Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso and the home city of FESPACO, one of the most important Pan-African film festivals in the world, was the scene of an exciting cinema utopia. With the support of the young president Thomas Sankara, the festival became a symbol of the cultural renaissance of a whole continent. The assassination of Sankara stifled the hopes of millions of young Africans, but the dynamism of FESPACO and African cinema did not stop.

Portrait of the Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa.

Meeting of two greats, Cissé's tribute to the dean of African cinema is without discours, without pathos. It is the one returned by his mini camera, which attends the funeral ceremonies that marked the departure of Ousmane Sembene in Dakar, and finds the relatives of Sembene in the house he had built in Yoff, directly on rocks beaten by the ocean. These simple and close images, with a distance from the ceremonial that Sembene would have appreciated, those briefly borrowed from his films and archives, weave a film full of friendship and fraternity.