Music- Mahlanini and Mahotella Queens -Track 8 -Stockfel ,Jive
Cue at 12
On a hot Saturday afternoon in Africa - a full house in a sports stadium - for an event that has nothing to do with sport.
In these parts - not only are they football crazy - but they're also mad about the movies.
For the first time, there was a South African delegation - including controversially , Winnie Mandela.
The crowd was thirty-five thousand. All this - for the opening of FESPACO Pan African film festival ..
Every two years, it attracts film-makers from allover Africa to one of the continent's poorest countries.
Cue at 44
You don't have to look very far to find that poverty. We filmed a few hundred yards from the stadium.
The average monthly wage in Burkina Faso is just twenty pounds . ..
Eighty percent of the population can't read or write. Hardly anyone has
television.
African film-makers began meeting here informally in 1969. And as their
meetings evolved into a festival, they sought to prove a point.
Sof Up:.In tie poorest countries
Sof Out: to go the cinema
Super; Med Hondo, Film Director, Mauritania
Cue at 1. 38
Ouagadougou- The capital of Burkina Faso - has a population of less than half a million.
But it still has twelve cinemas, as well as a special monument to African film-makers.
The shapes are borrowed from the film industry - from camera lenses and film cans. The result - a monument and a roundabout.
Sof Up: what with the dust
Sof Out: under the stars ( French)
Cue at 2.25
There's a practical reason for seeing films in the open air. It's cheap.
Tickets are about fifteen pence.
The price in the few air-conditioned cinemas is ten times as much.
For many African intellectuals, film was and is the only way they could find a voice.
PAUSE
Sof Up: ..
Sof Out: so I choose the cinema ( Chiekh Sissoko, Film Director, Mali)
Cue at 3.15
,YAABA' (1989 ( Oasis Films )
African film makers first really got noticed at European Film Festivals in 1980s.
Some made films, dissecting the colonial era - usually in a critical light.
Others harked back to a time before the white man arrived - and to African roots in traditional village story- telling.
Yaaba 'Made in Burkina Faso - is such a film. It took the jury prize at Cannes in 1989i) .
Sof Clip Up:
Sof Out: ..
Cue at 4 01
Some Africans are dismissive of this style of film-making; claiming it panders to a European stereotype of how Africans live.
With the French subsidizing much of the film-making in its former colonies in West Africa, the accusation is of neo-colonialism.
Sof Up: Franco has a certain policy ( 4.19)
Sof Out: slave situation
Super; Hondo
Cue at 4.45
Music - Track 1 Leaving Youssou n'dour
This is the paradox of African cinema. The films and indeed the festival still rely on money from Europe.
Although - in the case of Burkina Faso - the Africans are doing much to help themselves.
The film festival in Ouagadougou comes with a huge market - which spreads across the city centre.
Here is a serious hawking opportunity.
The Festival brings a lot of money into the country - somewhere in the region of two million pounds. A stall-holding can make as much here in a week - as most of his countrymen make in a decade. The government
subsidises the festival - not least because it puts Burkina Faso on the map.
Cue at 5.32
At night - Ouagadougou has a modest festive air, with its threads of coloured lights.
UP Drums briefly
Cue at 5.41
A thousand miles away is the brasher neon of Abijan, capital of the another former French colony, the Ivory Coast..
It's richer than its neighbour - but cinema bere is just as popular ..
Even in the migrant quarter - people go to movies three or four times a week.
What they get is a tasteful mix of Hollywood .....Bollywood ...and kung-fu as well as some memorable titles.
Just occasionally, they also show an African film - like Au Nom du Christ winner of the main prize at Ouagadougou, in 1993.
Sof Up; ..
Sof Out: a milll
Super; M' Bale
Cue at 6.48
Last week, a young Ivorean girl - Diarrassouba - left on a special school trip to the film festival in Burkina Faso.
Her mother took her to the airport - past the high rise skyline of Abidjan.
We caught up with her and her school chums - a few days later, driving through the market in Ouagadougou.
And asked her for her impressions.
Sof Up: ..
Sof OUt: ..
Super; Diarrassouba
Cue at 7.38
In the centenary year of cinema, a national film archive is now being
Established in Burkina Faso.
Already - they've completed the main building. And some 170 films are in stock.
Cue at 7'53"
They include what's believed to be the first film directed by an African, a simple love story called ‘Samba' made in 1928.
The hope is that the collection will be grow and grow. Within three years, there should be some 500 films - most of them from Film Institutes in Paris, Berlin and London. Modern African film-makers will be donating their work.
Cue at 8'15"
The words, Burkina Faso, mean the country of Incorruptible Men.
Most people live in the bush and work the land.
In a village called Balole - some twenty miles outside Ouagadougou - lives an old man called Zongo Tinbila.
No one knows exactly how old he is - some believe he could be ninety-six.
And he's certainly had a full life - nine wives - and according to his
grandson, he's fathered up to one hundred children.
As the village elder, Zongo's responsible for passing on its history by word of mouth.
But with the tradition fast disappearing, Africans now have a saying.
When an old one dies, his library dies with him ..
More than ever, Africans have a reason to tell their stories on film - to keep them for all generations, and for all time.