For many years, FCAT has reserved a special place for literature in its “parallel activities”, in particular through the project “Between the lines”, readings of African literary texts in the streets of Tarifa. This year we wanted to give a central place to literature, addressing its close relationship with cinema, through a retrospective of sixteen titles produced from the 1960s to the present day.
A subjective journey through the history of adaptation and cinema in Africa, starting in Egypt with The Beginning and the End (Abu Seif, 1960), an adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, an emblematic figure of the new Arab novel that paved the way for realistic and socially committed cinema in Egypt.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the adaptation of literary works also emerged at the same time as African cinema and independence. The pioneer Ousmane Sembène adapted his own novels, such as Le Mandat (1968), of which we present the recently restored version, aware that, in a country like Senegal with a largely illiterate population, cinema was a much more effective weapon for decolonising minds.
From a perspective of identity affirmation and critique of colonialism, many West African filmmakers have turned to oral tradition, myths and legends and pre-colonial African history. In 1986, Med Hondo brought Abdoulaye Mamani’s Sarraounia to the screen, a novel inspired by Queen Sarraounia, who resisted the advances of French expansionists. With Sia, the Myth of th Python (2001), Dani Kouyaté adapts a play by Moussa Diagana, a sort of synthesis between myth and history.
Cinema and literature are two expressions with very different languages. The talent of the filmmaker does not lie in their faithful transcription, but instead in transmitting their vision of the literary work. By creating something original and personal. This is what Djibril Diop Mambéty did when he transposed the Swiss Fridriech Dürenmatt’s The Visit of the Old Lady to his native Colobane, to create a satire on the theme of revenge and corruption (Hyenas, 1992). Angolan filmmaker Mariano Bartolomeu has also masterfully explored the question of domestication, adapting in his short films A Clean, Well-Lit Place (1991) and Who Makes Quim Run (1991) stories by Hemingway and the Japanese Kenzaburô Oe, which he transposed into Cuban and Angolan contexts respectively.
We wanted to pay tribute to Algeria, which is celebrating sixty years of independence this year and where many writers have committed themselves to cinema. This is the case of Assia Djebar, who, with the collaboration of the poet Malek Alloula, made The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (1983), in which he sets out to deconstruct the image of colonial Algeria by recovering the voices that were scorned and by reclaiming traditions. In Tahia ya Didou (1971), it is the writer Himoud Brahimi who co-wrote the script with Mohamed Zinet, to offer one of the most multifaceted and singular portraits of Algiers, far from the postcard image and orientalism. More recently, Let Them Come (Salim Barhimi, 2015), adapted from the novel by Arezki Mellal, is a chronicle of the black years in Algeria.
We also wanted to explore the interest shown by foreign filmmakers in African literature through two adaptations of some of the continent’s most important authors. Sleepwalking Land (2007), an adaptation by the Portuguese Teresa Prata of the work by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, and Disgrace (2008), an adaptation by the Australian Steve Jacobs, of the novel by the Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetze.
In a panel discussion accompanying this selection, African writers, directors and academics discuss and reflect on the links between film and literature. Adaptation in Africa and the possibilities that film, as a popular art form par excellence, can be a gateway to literature, just as literature can be a source of inspiration for a new generation of filmmakers.
