Africultures resuscitates the magazine “Ecrans d’Afrique”

The webzine Africultures, specialist in cultural news from Africa and its diaspora, publishes on its website the content of all issues ofAfrican screens (African Screen). The “international review of cinema, television and video” bilingual French / English, created in 1992 by African filmmakers, was published until 1998. The magazine, with its 24 issues, is the rich chronicle of a decade of life of the film industry on the continent and within of his diaspora.

Ecrans d’Afrique “explored all aspects of African film production”, can we read on Africultures. “Along with her many contemporaries, she sought to improve an intellectual climate that suffered from a lack of commentary on African cinema. A corollary of the journal’s efforts was to improve visibility and access to African films around the world. entire – it was linked to the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco), the main film festival on the continent, from its inception. ” The magazine “was also praised for his broad outlook on the entire African diaspora and for his excellent coverage of film developments in the Caribbean.”

Burkinabe critic Clément Tapsoba, who died in April 2020, was the chief editor ofAfrican screens, with Italian Alessandra Speciale, then artistic director of the African film festival in Milan organized in Italy by the Associazione COE. The latter is an NGO specializing in international cooperation and education through art who supported the review. The Milan festival, now the Fescaaal (Festival del Cinema Africano, from Asia e America Latina), which celebrates its 30th anniversary, was at its launch in 1991 exclusively devoted to film productions from the continent. The Burkinabè filmmaker Gaston Kaboré was, for his part, the publication director of this quarterly publication to which several cinema specialists on the continent have collaborated, like the American Beti Ellerson who today documents the presence of African women in this sector or the Senegalese critic Baba Diop.

These archives ofAfrican screens are all the more valuable as French-speaking magazines on African cinema are almost non-existent, with the exception, for example, of the magazine Awotele, also bilingual, currently published during the main festivals held on the continent. “There is none left, confirms Olivier Barlet, film critic at Africultures. In France, like review Africultures no longer appears, there is not even any paper support for numbers on the cinema. He Y has a few essentially American journals (…). A magazine-style medium is very difficult to finance and distribute … Especially, with the Internet, it is becoming relatively obsolete “. The journalist notes that these publications, in order to exist, need special support because they are often not profitable due to the lack of interest that still arouses film production on the continent.