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FESPACO and decolonization : about the role of the cinema in the anticolonial struggle in Africa
Palavras-chave: cinema negro, autorrepresentao social, pan-africanismo,
relaes raciais, arte e poltica.
From 1973 to the present day, happens in Burkina Faso, Africa, the Pan-African Festival of Cinema
and Television of Ouagadougou FESPACO. It is the oldest and biggest audiovisual event that
occurs in Africa. Including display, awards and discussion about films produced across Africa and its
diasporics territories by many producers and researchers. Such festival was conceived by
Burkinabs leaders of the revolution, to help the fight for colonial liberation, in the 1960s. The
maintenance of this event, with such expansion, is justified according to the organizers in function
of the perverse imaginary legacy of colonialism. The point, there is still a huge need for
reconstruction and reaffirmation that African countries feel about the images produced in
the colonial system, about Africa and its people. Therefore, in this oral communication, I will
present the initial data of a ethnographic research, still in process, that I am performing since 2014
as a PhD project. Where I investigate the role of FESPACO in the struggle of building and
strengthening of an African cinema that proposes decoloniza the imaginery of representations and
the cinematic discourses produced on the continent since the period of colonial systen. Thus,
from small fragments of some of the films that won the Prix talon of Yennenga, the main prize of
the festival, I analyze how the FESPACO has succeeded in establishing, or not, until our days, as
another, between many other forms, of struggle for decolonization and liberation with the
domination
models
brought
to
Africa
from
the
colonial
system.