Afrika Eye celebrates its 10th anniversary

You might be forgiven for thinking that an African film festival in Bristol would be fairly sedate affair full of white liberal WOMAD types given to fetishising the continent’s music and art. But that would be to overlook some vigorously contrasting perspectives.

“Once, we showed a film we’d made about the King of Swaziland called The King and the People and there was a very vociferous member of the Swazi pro-royal community in the audience,” recalls Afrika Eye festival director Ingrid Sinclair. “That was quite heated, but it didn’t come to fisticuffs or anything. Then when we showed the latest film from Jamaica to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence, some of the local Jamaicans thought it was a dreadful thing to show and said so in loud voices. It was exploring violence and crime on the streets of Kingston. They weren’t denying this happens; they were just saying that if you’re going to show a film to celebrate the 50th anniversary it should be a positive film. The answer to that was, (a) there weren’t any, and (b), actually, I consider it very positive if a country’s constitution allows a filmmaker to be critical. That is very important and doesn’t happen in lots of places.”

Ingrid and her husband Simon Bright have first-hand experience of this. They are themselves filmmakers who worked in Africa for more than 20 years. The couple were obliged to flee Zimbabwe pretty sharpish back in 2003 after being targeted as white media practitioners (they later made the eye-opening documentary Robert Mugabe . . . What Happened?), and settled in Bristol to be near Ingrid’s elderly parents. “When we came back, we realised quite quickly that nobody knew anything about African films at all,” she recalls.

A couple of their films had been shown at the Watershed by Black Pyramid. When that fizzled out, Ingrid came up with the idea of the Afrika Eye festival, which launched in 2005. “We found that there was a little market for African films and we felt that people would enjoy knowing more. The guiding light behind the festival was to show great African stories from an African perspective. That’s still the same.”

A major aim was to challenge stereotypes about Africa, which Ingrid lists succinctly as “lions, refugees, dictators, poverty, starvation and victims. Those things exist, but they’re just part of the picture. There are an awful lot of other things going on that are very positive. So we’ve challenged that from the start. We’ve also been very happy to show what I call auto-critiques, where African filmmakers have pointed out problems and issues in their own countries. I think that’s a very different thing to outsiders pointing them out.”

This year, the festival celebrates its 10th anniversary. Over the last decade, it has found a permanent home at the Watershed, forged a formal link with four other UK African film festivals, and pulled off a few coups. Last year, for example, Afrika Eye bagged a preview of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu a full six months before its official UK release. The film went on to be nominated for an Oscar and has been acclaimed as one of the best of the year.

So does the festival’s success indicate a growing appetite for African film? “I think it does, actually. In Britain, people are very aware of the anglophone ex-colonies and there are many more people than you might imagine who have links with Nigeria or Kenya or Zimbabwe. And cinephiles have come across some of the French-speaking African films. So I guess that means there were people who were already interested. But what we’ve also worked on is outreach stuff – music, dance, photography, and so on, to draw people in. That’s worked really well.”

This year’s country focus is on Senegal – chiefly because a selection of prints became available, many of which are regional premieres. The five UK African film festivals also successfully lobbied the BFI for much-needed loot as part of its nationwide Love project, so one strand of the festival is branded From Africa With Love. In keeping with the drive to widen the appeal of the festival, the opening night party includes sets by Senegalese musician and singer Amadou Diagne and his multi-cultural Group Yakar as well as the first public performance of a specially commissioned festival anthem by the newly formed Afrika Eye choir. The packed three-day birthday programme also includes workshops, seminars and children’s activities and concludes with a silent auction of an African quilt put together by various Bristol Stitch’n’Bitch groups, led by local artist Gaie Delap, with proceeds going to the British Red Cross’s Bristol Refugee Support Centre.

“We don’t have a specific audience,” Ingrid insists. “Anyone who comes is welcome. It’s just as important, if not more so, for white Bristolians to learn about Africa as it is for African people to have a view represented.”

Afrika Eye runs at the Watershed from Fri 13-Sun 15 Nov. See the detailed daily film listings starting here for full details of all screenings. Book in advance to see any three of the four films from Senegal and save £1 off each.

Afrika Eye Highlights

Hyenas (Fri 13)

The festival’s opening film, screened as part of the From Africa With Love strand, Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s award-winning 1992 drama is a dark comedy with a twist. When a woman returns to her debt-burdened village promising to share her newfound riches, there’s just one small catch: the villagers must kill the man who broke her teenage heart.

Grade (Sat 14)

A brand new short film by Bristol filmmaker, and previous Afrika Eye talent winner, Mike Jenkins. Billed as the first urban drama to be made in St. Pauls, it grew out of a filmmaking workshop held at the Malcolm X centre earlier this year and explores the pressures on a teenager as she juggles school work, peer pressure, family expectations and the myriad temptations of the inner city. See the film’s Facebook page for more.

Zarafa (Sat 14)

A multiple award-winning, beautifully hand-drawn animation about a boy who bonds with the eponymous giraffe, their friendship enduring even after the beast is sent to Paris as a gift for the king.

Lamb (Sun 15)

The first Ethiopian film ever to become an official selection at Cannes, Yared Zekele’s drama is the tale of an orphaned boy sent to live with his cousins in a rural village. His only comfort is his brown woolly bleating chum. But as a feast approaches, his new family start licking their lips.