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Locarno’s Open Doors co-production lab will this year focus on one of the most challenging film-making territories since the initiative’s launch. Melanie Goodfellow reports


IN FOCUS


Open Doors 2012 will cover sub-Saharan Francophone Africa:


1 Benin 2 Burkina Faso 3 Burundi 4 Cameroon 5 Central African Republic 6 Chad 7 Comoros 8 Ivory Coast 9 Democratic Republic of Congo 10 Djibouti 11 Equatorial Guinea 12 Gabon 13 Guinea 14 Guinea-Bissau 15 Madagascar 16 Mali 17 Mauritania 18 Mauritius 19 Niger 20 Republic of Congo 21 Rwanda 22 Senegal 23 Seychelles 24 Togo


17 16 22 14 2 13 8 24 5 4 11 12 20 9


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23 1 19 6 10


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tion; a Thelma & Louise-style, Mali- set road movie and an albino girl’s coming-of-age tale are some of the subjects on the table at the Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors co-pro- duction laboratory this year. The initiative, which supports


T


film-makers from countries where cinema is developing, focuses on French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa at its tenth edition (August 4-7). The event will present 12 feature


film and documentary projects hail- ing from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mali, Niger and Senegal. “We have selected a mix of proven


directors and new talent, and film- makers with roots in the region but who are based elsewhere and direc-


n 2 Screen International August 2012


eenage rebellion in the Sen- egalese capital of Dakar; life in a Malagasy mental institu-


tors who have remained in their native country,” says Open Doors head Martina Malacrida. Film-makers due to attend include


established figures such as avant- garde Cameroonian director Jean- Pierre Bekolo, last in Locarno 20 years ago with his celebrated debut feature Quartier Mozart, and compa- triot documentary maker Jean-Marie Teno whose last film Sacred Places, about the demise of the movie thea- tre in his native Cameroon, toured festivals around the world including IDFA and Sheffield Doc/Fest. Meanwhile Burkinabe director


Michel K Zongo, whose Espoir Voy- age about migrant workers pre- miered at Berlin this year, will unveil his documentary, Faso Fani, The End Of The Dream, about the closure of a textile factory in his home town. Emerging talent includes two


With 47% of the population


‘We only manage to get one feature-length film off the ground every


two years in Mali’ Souleymane Cissé, film-maker


recent participants of Focus Fea- tures’ Africa First short film pro- gramme, US-Ghanaian Akosua Adoma Owusu and Mali’s Daouda Coulibaly. Other debut feature direc- tors include Malagasy film-maker Laza, who founded the Rencontres du Film Court film festival. French-speaking Sub-Saharan


Africa is arguably one of the most challenging film-making territories to have been put under the spotlight by Open Doors since its launch in 2003.


across Sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1.25 a day, according to recent World Bank figures, film finance — public or private — is rare. “These days we only manage to


get one feature-length film off the ground every two years in Mali,” comments Souleymane Cissé, the first African film-maker to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival with his film Yeelen, which clinched the Jury Prize in 1987. Cissé’s Bamako-based Les Films


Cissé is producing Daouda Couliba- ly’s The Eye Of Ladji (Ladji Nye). The veteran film-maker has invested $12,300 (¤10,000) of his own money in a bid to kick-start the project. The region’s key film-making ter-


ritory is Burkina Faso, says Alex Moussa Sawadogo, founder of the Berlin-based Afrikamera festival,


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