Yam Daabo (The Choice). 1987. Burkina Faso. Written and directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo. With Moussa Bologo, Aoua Guiraud, Assita Ouédraogo. New York premiere. In More; English subtitles. 78 min.
The excitement in Burkina Faso was palpable when, on August 4, 1983, the charismatic Burkinabé military officer Thomas Sankara staged a revolutionary coup, promising to bring Marxist reforms and an ethos of African self-reliance to his impoverished nation and, indeed, to the continent as a whole. As Mohamed Challouf, the organizer of Italy’s first African film festival, would recall, “Ousmane Sembène, Tahar Cheriaa, Med Hondo, Lionel Ngakane, Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, Haile Gerima were all at the forefront of supporting the actions of this young president who wanted to restore Africa’s dignity and free it from neo-colonialism, corruption and the crushing world economic order. In 1987, at FESPACO, I attended the world premiere of Yam Daabo. The ‘choice’ the title refers to is the courageous decision of a rural family from the Sahel to refuse international aid from USAID and set off looking for other lands, but also for their own dignity and emancipation…. My happiness was indescribable: Idrissa [Ouedraogo] proved to be a master, interacting with the great African pioneers….” Only months after the festival world premiere of Yam Daabo, on October 15, 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by his former friend and associate Blaise Compaoré.
4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and L’Image Retrouvée laboratories, in collaboration with Les Films de la Plaine and the family of Idrissa Ouédraogo, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema; courtesy Janus Films.
Le Sénégal et le Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. 1966. Senegal. Directed by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. North American premiere. In French; English subtitles. 28 min.
Long believed lost, this promotional newsreel is an indelible record of a watershed moment in political and cultural history, the first World Festival of Black Arts, held in the capital of Dakar between April 1 and 24, 1966, at the instigation of Senegal’s first president, the poet Leópold Sédar Senghor, under the auspices of the influential magazine Présence Africaine and the African Cultural Society. The festival attracted an international who’s who of writers, artists, dancers, and musicians including, as seen in the film, Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars, Duke Ellington, Joséphine Baker, Langston Hughes, Aminata Fall, Robert Hayden, and many others.
4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with the Ministère de la Culture et du Patrimoine Historique de Sénégal – Direction du Cinéma, with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema; courtesy Janus Films.
This program is co-presented with the African Film Festival New York.