Challenging stereotypes.

• Author: Bakupa-Kanyinda, Balufu
• Position: Film in Africa, Africa in Film

To make a film means to be a producer, requiring a combination of the art and technique of film narration and the tricks of finance. Being a producer is also about giving adequate answers to questions that underlie the desire and reasons for producing: What to produce? Why? How? Both objectively and subjectively, these questions determine the entire cultural or commercial vision, the strategy behind any movie or video production.

If one is concerned about the alienation of Africa, which is currently saturated with foreign and strange images produced elsewhere, then production issues are not limited only to financial support, technical expertise or artistic passion. Financial success at the box office or in the bank is not the only goal of production. Television and the movies are the best means of conveying memory and popular culture.

To produce a film in Africa is an act of resistance. It is about looking at the world's stories and giving one's opinion about them, capturing and inquiring about collective memory, attracting, entertaining and informing. It is also about making Africans realize that cinema is a powerful tool for development.

Since cinematography was invented, the stereotypical African has been portrayed all over the world as a debased individual. Africans have been the victims of false historical and cultural ideology, whose best propaganda is cinema (and its by-product, television). On every screen in the continent, big or small, western movies prevail. Cinema is wonderfully subversive under its beautiful lights of entertainment.

Africa, without its own "mirror", does not know who it is anymore. Children's heroes are no longer Mandela, Biko, Lumumba, Nkrumah or Sankara, but blonde women and men with blue or green eyes. In Hollywood, Egypt is not even considered to be in Africa! Where are the African movies that truly reflect African culture?

Africa produces an average of ten movies per year and broadcasting is still a difficult problem there. Why would a peasant in Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo, grow a product that is not consumed? Most African TV stations are not interested in African movies. When they finally agree to broadcast some, it is often because a western institution helped to produce them. I do not know what my song is for, but I can bury it", says the poet Xavier Ramilla.

What are African movies about? Is it a peacefully exotic, comically fatalist or pathetic Africa? Are they about a contemplative world...