Isabel Laguna I Tarifa (Cádiz), (EFE).- The Tarifa and Tangier African Film Festival (FCAT) celebrates its 20th edition, a new occasion in which, through the 60 films it will screen and endless of activities, it will become a great window towards Africa, the still unknown black continent.
The FCAT was born twenty years ago, when Tarifa had already been receiving thousands of Africans who jumped into the sea from the Strait of Gibraltar to reach the Spanish coast.
Mané Cisneros, its founder, has also just arrived in Tarifa, after living for several years in countries like Mexico, and was surprised at how these “floods of people” from Africa came to a country that “knew nothing about them,” she says. in an interview with EFE.
“They were people who came to stay. We would have to be good hosts and know something about them, ”she recalls.
It was then that he thought that cinema could be the perfect “tool” to undertake this dialogue. And that Tarifa, the point closest to the African continent, was the ideal setting for this meeting.
The FCAT, something punctual
Mané Cisneros had already felt the power of cinema at the hands of his uncle, José Luis Ruiz, founder of the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival. There he met whom he considers his “tutor”, Luis Buñuel.
This is how he came up with the idea of going to the Tarifa Town Hall to propose holding an African film exhibition, thinking that it would be “something specific”.
“When that first show ended, the public itself asked if the show would be on the same dates the following year. I realized that I had gotten myself into a very big mess.”
So big that Mané Cisneros has been directing this exhibition for twenty years, which now has a leg in Europe, in Tarifa. And another in Africa, in Tangier (in addition to displaying his activities in Ceuta or El Puerto de Santa María).
The FCAT opens on both legs, with the projection, almost simultaneously, of the Tunisian film “Among the fig trees” directed by Erige Sehir. And that reflects how during the gathering of figs young women and men display emotions, dreams and hopes. The “Spanish Alcarrás”, they say.
It is one of the ten films competing in the “Hypermetropia” section, for feature films or documentaries. Along with other titles such as “The Cinema Cemetery”, a premiere in Spain of the work that Thierno Souleymane Diallo has done, traveling around Guinea with his video camera to investigate how “Mouramani” was produced in 1953, directed by Mamadou Touré and considered the first film made by a French-speaking black filmmaker.
Cinema marked by young people
The contest will also screen the ten shorts that participate in the “In Brief” section.
In the programming of its 20th edition, the retrospective entitled “It is at the end of the old rope that the new one is woven”, which will offer 24 titles selected by critics and African filmmakers, stands out. That reflect the past and the future of the cinema of the black continent and its diasporas.
The FCAT has witnessed 20 years of evolution of a cinematography as diverse and wide as the continent itself and that shares the few possibilities that all have had to bring their stories to Western cinemas.
“In these 20 years we have experienced a generational change. The founding fathers of African cinemas have passed away and there has been a second very important change, the advent of digital that has lowered costs and has allowed young people to enter the cinema, including women, who were moonlighting in the movies, like tailors, dressmakers, actresses, but little by little they had taken up the camera until recently to make a fiction”, explains Cisneros.
Current African cinema is “very marked by young people, who want to tell the world from a personal, individual vision.
Deep down, the same old issues continue to worry us, but now Africa is more open to the rest of the planet. Mobile phones play a fundamental role in breaking the isolation in which Africa lived. And there is a very large diaspora that interacts and brings new images and customs. It is a cinema with increasingly global readings, without giving up its own identity ”, she points out.
African culture container
Beyond the cinema, the FCAT becomes until May 7 “a great container of African culture.” With space for photography, literature, plastic arts, professional training and for the youngest.
“Every year we ask ourselves how we can do so much with a tiny budget, the same one it had in its second edition, in 2005. It gives an idea of how much we could do, how much we could discover and how little capable we are in this country to value a unique festival”. EFE