Morocco: African film schools invited to open departments for the promotion, distribution and sale of African films

Roots Rabat: African film schools invited to open departments for the promotion, distribution and sale of African films

Rabat, March 17, 2023 (AIB)- African film schools must open promotion, distribution and sales departments to sell and bring African films to life, the director of the Pan-African Fund for the Mohamed Said Ouma Documentary Cinema .

“All African film schools must open departments for the promotion, distribution and sale of films to train young people who will sell and bring African films to life”, recommended this Wednesday in Rabat, the director of the Pan-African Fund. for the Mohamed Saïd Ouma Documentary Cinema.

Mr. Ouma spoke at the microphone of the AIB on the sidelines of the 1st edition of Roots Rabat-Days of Pan-African Cinema which was held from Sunday March 12 to Thursday March 16, 2023 in Rabat, African capital of culture under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI.

Taking Burkina Faso as an example, he asserted that there is “no better than a Burkinabe international sales agent to sell Burkinabe content to the world because they know how to position culture across the cinema of Burkina in the world”.

He felt that “it’s fine to train filmmakers, producers and technicians” but wondered what we “do with these films afterwards” if there is no one to sell them, restore and archive them.

He said that “if we do not have promoters, distributors, sellers, archivists, restorers, our many current productions on the continent will not survive”.

“And it’s not a Festival that’s going to do this work, nor the Film Financing Funds, but it’s rather an educational task that film schools must strive to do in a systemic and really progressive way,” said he advised.

Mohamed Saïd Ouma also deplored the fact that his Fund receives plans to apply for funding from African films that are unrealistic. “We see that there are gaps in production strategies”.

Its strategies, according to him, “should be national, regional and sub-regional” but not centered on the realities of other continents.

He also advised African film actors to identify and seek their funds from private Africans and not from international funds where there is huge competition with producers and documentary filmmakers from around the world.

These international funds, he continued, “are not only specialized in Africa but in the world as a whole”.

Mr. Ouma also deplored among African filmmakers, “the lack of cinematographic culture on the documentary genre”.

“We are not asking a filmmaker from Burkina to give us references from Russian or other filmmakers, but he must at least have a culture of the Burkinabè filmmaker,” he underlined.

He remarked that one has the impression “that young filmmakers do not know that there is a history of cinema in their country when there have been filmmakers before them, several generations of documentary filmmakers before them”. .

The Director of the Pan-African Fund for Documentary Cinema Mohamed Saïd Ouma therefore encouraged African film schools to take into account his various concerns in their training.

Source: Burkina Information Agency