Responsible for the programming of the Ecrans Noirs 2020 festival, director Hélène Ebah reviews the selection of this 24 edition in this year marked by the Covid 19 pandemic.
Interview conducted on October 23, 2020
It was at the Ecrans Noirs headquarters at the Abbia crossroads in Yaoundé that Hélène Ebah, head of the festival’s programming, agreed to receive us. She made a point of answering our questions while giving her team one or two indications from time to time.
“Culture must continue to live on despite the Covid”
Ayila: The 24th edition of the Ecrans Noirs festival begins on October 31, 2020 with 81 films selected. What is the working atmosphere like 10 days before the start of the festival?
Hélène Ebah: We are in full swing right now because the lineup is due out online today, so we are in the process of making the final changes that are needed.
The festival has decided to resist in this year where the Covid has brought almost everyone to the ground. Several festivals did not take place. How has the programming been influenced by this situation?
We were in the film selection period when the Covid problem arose, we immediately decided to postpone the date. For a festival like Ecrans Noirs, the advantage of a delay is that it gives directors and producers more time for their films. This means that this year we have a lot of good quality Cameroonian films and with regard to the festival the general delegate, Mr. Bassek Ba Kobhio, did not want to make a blank year, a decision hailed by many cultural operators. I think that even if no one is held to the impossible, culture must continue to live on despite the Covid.
In this post-Covid atmosphere, how will screenings be managed with the restrictions linked to barrier measures.
This year the festival takes place entirely at the Palais des Sports in Yaoundé. Some of the documentaries will be screened at the Goethe Institute. Then the number of people present in the theaters for the screenings will be reduced. Several other articulations will take place online like the conference. There will be an online vote, the public can vote for the web-series category, the vote will be taken on the Ecrans Noirs website. For activities other than screenings, the public can experience them online. But for the screenings, we want the public to be present and we will take the necessary measures to respect the barrier measures against Covid.
For this edition there are 81 films in the official selection, feature films, short films, documentaries, series, and even web series. You have decided to cast a wide net this year. Why this choice and doesn’t it sound a bit huge?
No, it’s not huge, you know Ecrans Noirs is an intercontinental festival, and we must be able to bring together all the categories that create emulation in the evolution of African cinema. If there are so many films it is because the festival is famous and therefore we have received a lot of films and we cannot leave all this know-how aside. We had to find a way to show this wide range of films that demonstrate the emulation of Cameroonian and African cinema.
Why this choice of the web series for this edition of the festival?
It turns out that the webseries are an important starting point to start telling stories at the cinema level. We can take the example of some Americans who started with webseries and then found producers to tell stories at a higher level with more adequate production and distribution. So the web series is really the beginning of a cinematographic emulation, it’s like an awakening, we must not forget that in a film we tell a story, in the web series we tell stories even if they are short. And these stories touch people because they make people laugh, they make people cry. So, we can’t say that the web series isn’t cinema because it’s online or because it’s not playing in theaters.
“Today Africa is learning to tell its own stories”
And if we were talking about themes, what are the main themes that the festival wanted to focus on this year by selecting and programming all these films?
In reality we are not focused on a particular theme in the choice of films. If the theme of a film is well taken and the film is aesthetically of good quality, we are ready …
But in view of the social environment that characterizes Africa in this period, is there not a bias on the part of the festival for the choice of films?
The part taken is that most of the films we have received, even the ones we did not select, tell stories from home. Today Africa is learning to tell its own stories, it is not this kind of copy that we saw before compared to American films, we are now telling our stories in relation to our way of seeing life and living. our daily. It was a very pleasant surprise to see that Africans more and more tell stories that correspond to us and correspond to our environment, which correspond to our culture to our customs, even if in most films we stick to a certain modernity of the universes of life, but in this modernity there is our essence which emerges.
This year, the focus is also on Cameroonian films …
Yes, this is perhaps the good side of the Covid, because it allowed Cameroonian filmmakers to work, several were in editing and post production, the fact that we have pushed back the date has meant that many Cameroonian films can be ready which means that we received a lot and we just chose 10 but those we did not choose were not unworthy. There were some good films, but the ones we chose were really good quality films. We are very happy with our selection.
Can we already know the opening and / or closing films?
The opening film is a film that is not in competition, and the closing film is the film that will be crowned best Cameroonian film, so we do not yet know who will be the best Cameroonian film (laughs) but the opening film is .. Well we know it but I can not give you the title yet.
Interview by Rostand Wandja
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