“I would like to see films that take risks”

Interview: Esther Sambale

Mr Bekolo, you were born in the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé in 1966. What is your earliest memory of cinema or a film?

When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a cinema in Yaoundé with school. What I remember in particular is the big screen. We watched one of those sword-and-sandal films – “Moses”, I think. Later, I encountered 1970s French crime thrillers and American classics thanks to my father. He was a chief of police and also responsible for issuing entry and exit visas. People would sometimes bring him films from abroad. Later, I would often go to the cinema with friends.

Which films would you watch together?

Back then we tended to go and see spaghetti westerns and Chinese films. I must have seen “The Big Boss” starring Bruce Lee 30 times. When Chinese martial arts films became popular in the West in the late 1980s, we had already been watching them for years.

You have devoted yourself to reinventing African cinema for more than three decades now. Which stereotypes do you want your filmmaking to break?

For me, it is not about deconstructing stereotypes. I ignore them. Postcolonial mindsets get stuck in the past, and I try to forget them in my films. The way I see it, colonialism is a serious accident that happened. A trauma that I do not wish to base my life on. I want to set African history in motion.

How?

By making afrofuturistic films in which I imagine a future where the colonial encounter with the West never happened.

“I imagine a future where the colonial encounter with the West never happened”

Your film “Those Who Bleed” is considered the first science fiction film from an African country. How can afrofuturistic visions transform African reality?

“What if?” is the question that I ask myself at the beginning of a film. It opens the doors to something that doesn’t exist. This way of thinking can also change reality. Currently, Africa is stuck in the past and the present. Imagining an alternative future makes it possible to free oneself from this prison.

Time and again you criticise the political elite in African countries, claiming that it keeps neo-colonialism in place – like in your 2013 fictitious documentary “Le Président”, which is based on the long-ruling President Paul Biya and banned in Cameroon. What political agency does cinema have?

I am very disappointed by cinema just now because it is very bourgeois and complacent. At the moment, I see no cinema films about the war in Ukraine or the situation in Israel and Gaza. And yet cinema could highlight alternatives to political realities and inspire audiences to think for themselves and reflect. I would like to see films that take risks, and cinema that actively engages with the problems of our time. I admire journalists who immerse themselves in the story as it unfolds.

And that is exactly what you did in “Le Président”?

By telling the fictitious story of a president who disappears the evening before the elections, my aim was to give Cameroonian audiences food for thought. Actually, it doesn’t take much to imagine that a 91-year-old man who has been in power for 42 years will die one day. And yet people appear to be scared by this idea.

You explore change and the future not only in films, but also in an academic context, for example in your latest book “Cinema as a Transformative Tool for the Therapeutic Intellectual”. What contribution can cinema make to decolonisation?

If cinema succeeds in creating new worlds and transforming the painful past into art, it can have a healing effect. To overcome individual and collective trauma, African cinema must reinvent itself. I see this as the job of the “therapeutic individual”. However, the Western film industry and filmmakers also have a responsibility, for example, when they make films about African issues. Using the lives and stories of others as film material without incorporating their viewpoints and perspectives is a kind of exploitation. I wrote in my book “Cinema as a Transformative Tool” what Western filmmakers shouldn’t do when they are in African countries.

In 2018 you wrote an open letter to the Berlinale Film Festival entitled “Don’t Talk about Us”. What was your criticism?

One of the things I produced for the Berlinale was “Our Wishes”, a TV series about the first encounter between Germans and Africans that led to colonialism. My contribution was not included in the festival programme. In my view, this revealed an attitude of: “Tell us about yourselves, but don’t talk about us.” And this despite the fact that we know that colonialism has not been overcome. I dream of a world in which we no longer have to talk about these things.

As an author and university lecturer, you provide tools for self-empowerment such as your Alphabet of Film. Can you explain what this is?

In many African countries, film students seem intimidated when it comes to writing scripts in English or French. My alphabet is a deck of cards which breaks down cinematic elements into symbols. It allows everyone to develop stories in their own language.

As a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2016, you showed part of the alphabet in your exhibition “Welcome to Applied Fiction”. How did your time in Berlin influence your work?

Berlin had a positive influence on my work. While there, I also finally completed the post-production of a film that had been on my computer for years.

Which film was that?

The sci-fi film “Naked Reality”. You can see Berlin trees in the background that I filmed and added later during my time in Berlin. The decision to show the film in black-and-white was also taken there. It was probably the “Berlin spirit” that helped me complete it. Berlin was also important for my following film: I shot it there in a warehouse with a rental car and Parisian actors in front of a green screen. It’s about Liliane Bettencourt, once the world’s richest woman, and her – fictional – Cameroonian chauffeur. The film will be my next submission to the Cannes Film Festival.

Discover some of the symbols from Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Alphabet of Film in the image gallery (left).

Jean-Pierre Bekolo was born in Yaoundé in 1966 and is one of Cameroon’s most renowned filmmakers. He studied physics at the University of Yaoundé, trained as an editor at the Institut national de lʼaudiovisuel in Paris and then studied semiotics under the renowned film studies expert Christian Metz. His debut film “Quartier Mozart” (1992) won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and festivals in Locarno and Montreal. His book “Cinema as a Transformative Tool for the Therapeutic Intellectual. Putting Postcolonial Theories in Motion” was published by the Berlin publishing house Missread in 2023. His latest work, “We Black People”, is a fictitious documentary that explores the history of Colombia’s Afro-American population and their resistance to slavery and colonisation.