15 Jun 2017

Galle Ceddo Projects in conjunction with dozens of African institutions presented The Sembene Across Africa project, a three-day series of free public screenings of the award-winning documentary film SEMBENE! at Alliance Française.

The film celebrates Ousmane Sembene; regarded as the father of African cinema, who spent decades shaping a meaningful, visionary cinema for a newly independent Africa.

According to Samba Gadjigo, director of the film and Sembene’s official biographer, the project represents a giant step towards the primary goal of injecting Sembene’s essential legacy of engaged, empowering and progress-minded story telling back into African consciousness.

“Sembene Across Africa is designed to inspire anyone working for African progress. Using the new tools of cultural empowerment; digital delivery, social media, grassroots organising, we hope to share Sembene’s powerful story across an entire continent, to the large audience that will appreciate SEMBENE! the most,” he said.

Ousmane Sembene spent 50 years making films and writing books in a tireless and forceful attempt to reorient Africans after generations of colonisation, but 10 years after his death he still remains unknown to most young Africans.

For decades, during Africa’s colonial period and until African independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, European-run schools, newspapers, TVs, movies and languages were Africa’s dominant cultural forces.

African culture was criminalised and marginalised and many Africans lost connection with their past.

Starting with his first film, Borom Sarret, completed in 1962, Sembene set out to use movies as what he called an evening school for Africans.

His works revisited history from African perspectives, called out corrupt leaders and celebrated what he called the heroes of every day.

Sembene had a message of self-empowerment, ownership of one’s culture and Pan Africanism.

The 2004’s Moolaadé was the final film of Ousmane Sembene, who died in 2007.

Sembene was an artist never intimidated by controversy, nor did his patriotism lead him to self-censorship.

His 1975 film, Xala confronted institutional corruption in his native Senegal.

The 1977’s Ceddo was controversially frank about sectarian conflict between Muslims, Christians, and traditional spirituality.

His vision in Moolaadé is a culturally specific condemnation of West African practices of female genital mutilation, but also a universally relevant exploration of cultural inertia and the personal cost of change. ENDS