MOVIES : Cinema Ouagadougou : You think you know film festivals? Cannes and Sundance are fine but can’t compare to the rich Pan African Film Festival, which celebrates African culture even as it proves how hard it is to define.

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso —  The crowd, estimated at 40,000, pours through an honor guard of mounted camels and overflows the biggest stadium in the country. For the next 3 1/2 hours a kaleidoscopic spectacle unfolds, made up of flowery political speeches in two languages, performances by world-class musicians such as Malhatini and the Mahotela Queens, a pantomime by 500 schoolchildren, choreographed prancing by elaborately garbed horsemen, dazzling fireworks, even a ceremonial ribbon-cutting and release of multicolored balloons by the nation’s president.

Is this any way to open a film festival? For FESPACO, the Festival Panafricaine du Cinema de Ouagadougou, a spectacular occasion whose 14th edition ended last month, it is simply business as usual.

Held every other year at the end of February, FESPACO’s celebration of African cinema (relatively unknown in the United States despite visits by domestic celebrities including Alice Walker, Tracy Chapman and John Singleton) is a film event like no other in the world. To understand why, all preconceived notions of festivals as merely places where movies are shown must be discarded.

Of course, hundreds of films from all across Africa and the African diaspora are available to be seen here, both in competition on the big screen and in a parallel video film market known as MICA, providing an unequaled opportunity to view the entire range of production from Algeria to South Africa and beyond.

The choicest films at FESPACO compete for the festival’s equivalent of Cannes’ Palme d’Or , the Etalon de Yennenga , depicting the legendary horsewoman who is considered the progenitor of the country’s predominant Mossi tribe.

This year, the jury, headed by celebrated 71-year-old director Ousmane Sembene, called l’aine des anciens (the elder of elders), awarded the Etalon to the festival’s most popular film, “Guimba,” directed by Cheick Omar Sissoko of neighboring Mali. A gorgeously produced, bawdy costume drama about an evil king, his dwarf son and the mother and daughter they want to force into marriage, it mixes magic, spectacle and comedy in a vivid, spirited way.

Its only competition in terms of popularity was “Keita,” by Burkina filmmaker Dani Kouyate, which won the Prix Oumarou Ganda for best first film. A charming piece about how an old griot (played by the director’s father, Sotigue Kouyate, whom theatrical audiences will remember from Peter Brook’s stage version of “The Mahabharata”) teaches a young boy about his past, “Keita” was a perfect film to see with the legendarily responsive African audiences, which packed the theaters and roared appreciatively at the film’s gently comic situations.

“In the United States, African films are shown in the context of museums and art cinema, so they tend to be received reverently, with deference and respect,” explained Richard Pena, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and director of the New York Film Festival. “Here you can see how open and dialogic the relationship to film is. Godard said that cinema is what goes on between the screen and the audience, and it really goes on here. You are seeing a truly communal experience.”

But even more than for what it shows, FESPACO is noteworthy as a matter of enormous national pride and effort to this striving West African country the size of Colorado. Called “desperately, and famously, poor” by one guidebook, the former Upper Volta, in a scenario that even Hollywood would reject as outlandish, has managed by a combination of passion and determination to turn itself into the undisputed capital of the African film world.

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Ouaga, as the locals call this hot, dusty city of half a million, gives itself over body and soul to FESPACO, starting with releasing its 15 screens to the festival. These range from the spacious, air-conditioned Cine Neerwaya (meaning “the beauty has come” in More, the primary local language), at 1,200 seats one of the biggest theaters in West Africa, to outdoor venues in the city’s remoter locales.

FESPACO made itself felt locally in other ways. Those who could afford it wore clothing made from special FESPACO commemorative cloth, the national lottery inaugurated a special “millionaire” drawing to mark the festival and postage stamps were issued to honor Gaston Kabore and Idrissa Ouedraogo, the country’s most celebrated living directors.

Several of the city’s main streets, festooned with banners proclaiming uplifting slogans such as “FESPACO: Pride of a Continent,” were closed off and turned into a pedestrian shopping mall. There Ouaga’s residents, benefiting from a government decree giving everyone half-days off for the duration of the festival, jostled with tourists at crowded booths where merchants from all over Africa sold souvenirs, handed out free cigarettes and condoms and distributed literature about buying fax machines and supporting the Intra-African Union for Human Rights.

Yet even this does not explain why the festival draws thousands of journalists and participants from dozens of countries as distant as Japan, Romania and Brazil, as well as African luminaries who this year ranged from Nigeria’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Wole Soyinka to controversial South African political figure Winnie Mandela.

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Simply put, FESPACO has become Africa’s preeminent cultural event. To stand in the lobby of the Hotel Independence, the festival’s central meeting place, to admire the various styles of traditional dress and read the gazetteer of countries on passing name tags, is to feel that the entire continent, geographically and culturally, has somehow gathered in this one place. For its eight days, FESPACO is the focal point of Africa’s consciousness, the place where this perennially neglected continent comes to examine itself. And as the medium chosen for this task, film assumes an importance that is rarely felt elsewhere.

“Our country is modest and underdeveloped, and people used to say that priority in development should be for agriculture and other things,” says Filippe Sawadogo, FESPACO’s affably driven secretary general and the man who has run the festival for the past decade. “Now we understand that no people can be developed without their own culture, that showing our own culture is a priority. If you know yourself in terms of identity, you can succeed.”

This year, which is being celebrated worldwide as the centenary of cinema, seems especially promising for African cinema. Both the Toronto Film Festival and the British Film Institute used FESPACO as the occasion to announce major new African film series for 1995 and the consensus was that, in Richard Pena’s words, “African film feels vibrant at a time when so much of cinema is looking around at how to cut its losses. A wonderful and intoxicating sense of pride hangs over the whole festival. You feel nothing but hope here.”

Though the post-colonial history of African cinema is scarcely more than 30 years old, the medium has always been one of enormous importance for this continent, partly because, in one director’s words, “there are no illiterates in the world of cinema,” making it the ideal method for reaching the widest possible audience.

More than that, Africans feel an intense need to control the way both their own people and the world at large view the African experience. “Traditionally images have been used to dominate Africa, doing damage to the minds of colonized people, telling them they are less important,” says Kabore, the pioneering Burkinabe director whose “Wend Kuuni” is celebrated as the first black African picture to win a Cesar for the best Francophone film. “But ever since we started making films, we have used cinema as a tool of liberation, liberating the individual in his mind. We need to describe our own reality by ourselves.”

Though this is a feeling that echoes across the entire continent, there are other factors that divide African filmmakers, and none more sharply than the language issue. For reasons that are still debated, perhaps stemming from the French belief in culture as an end in itself vs. an English desire to make all things utilitarian, the majority of the most successful and celebrated directors in Africa come from the Francophone countries of the West and the North.

As a result of this, FESPACO has in the past been viewed as a Francophone event, where it is the rare film that has English subtitles and 11 of the 12 winners of the Etalon have come from countries where French is the predominant European language. But though the French continue to provide considerable assistance to West African filmmakers, the festival has taken steps to make itself accessible to English speakers, and this year, with South Africa invited to attend for the first time, even more of an attempt at outreach in terms of simultaneous translation and bilingual printed material was made. “We are not Francophone or Anglophone,” FESPACO’s Sawadogo said on opening night. “We are Africaphone.”

For the filmmakers themselves, who come to the festival by the hundreds, these kinds of divisions seem less important than the rare chance to mingle with peers. Though admitting that “non-French speakers can tend to feel out of it,” prominent Nigeria director Ola Balogun said that was far outweighed by “the unique opportunity to see other filmmakers. It’s not like we are all living in one country; we are dispersed, with different schedules to cope with, so there are lots of reunions here.”

In fact, FESPACO has gotten so big and successful that, in an unexpected parallel to the controversy that eternally swirls around the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, participants argue about whether the event has gotten too large and too commercial, whether it’s lost its Africanness, its sense of direction, the purity of its spirit.

“People grumble that as FESPACO has gotten bigger it has grown out of all proportion to the growth of African cinema,” says June Givanni, the British Film Institute’s chief African film programmer. “But it is a celebration, and I don’t think those things are necessarily bad. The festival has the difficult task of balancing things, but you can still find the whole spectrum here, the edge and the passionate discussions with people not mincing words as well as the glitzy side.”

What most African filmmakers wanted to talk about, however, was not FESPACO’s flaws but the perennial twinned difficulties of first raising money to make a film and then, something that turns out to be even more difficult, finding a way to get it shown on the African continent.

One of the great paradoxes of African filmmaking is that, in Kabore’s words: “Our films are strangers in their own territories. It is easier to watch an African film in New York, Los Angeles, London or Paris than in Lesotho, Botswana, Nigeria or Kenya. If audiences are given the opportunity to see them, they are rushing to go. African audiences are keen to watch movies where their reality is reflected. But our films are made outside of an economic system, we do not have producers or distributors with financial and economic clout, so our movies do not have the ability to circulate.”

“90% of African Films Will Never Be Seen By Africans Themselves.” So reads a flyer handed out by Daniel Cuxac, whose Ivory Coast-based DC Productions is one of the few companies attempting to put African films on video to increase their local availability. “After FESPACO the light will be off and we will find again the hard realities,” he says. “After their films are shown in the festivals, the filmmakers stay in their houses, they don’t know where to go.” Language barriers, the expense of subtitles, the uncertainty of getting both money and films back from other countries, all contribute to the problem.

One potential way out of these difficulties, at least for the most prominent directors, is to get financing from European entities such as television networks. But taking this money, welcome as it is, can present a particular difficulty.

“When you write a script to please European producers, you take their expectations into consideration; if you are spending 10 million French francs, you are wondering what kind of results you will get in France,” explains Kabore. “Our films can become unbalanced, we are so weak we are turning like this and like that. The danger is forgetting your own people, your own fundamental vision, and presenting Africa only as Europe is prepared to receive it. The danger is we will lose our souls.”

One filmmaker who has made his peace with Europe to the point of dividing his time between homes in Ouaga and Paris is Idrissa Ouedraogo, at 40 considered to be the rising young star of African cinema. His first feature, “Yaaba,” won the International Critics Prize at Cannes; his next, “Tilai,” took that festival’s Special Jury Prize and won the Etalon at FESPACO, and his third, “Samba Traore,” was given the Silver Bear at Berlin.

A relaxed man with a kind of amiable swagger about him, Idrissa, as everyone calls him, says he works out of Europe out of hard necessity. “The gods don’t love us here in Burkina; taking airplanes, making phone calls, everything is very difficult, very expensive,” he says with a smile. “Here there are not so many opportunities to make films and to make contacts as in Europe.”

Working in Europe, using non-African crews and non-African casts, has made Idrissa a controversial figure, something he easily shrugs off. “It is normal for people not to like me, because I can get financing outside of the traditional ways,” he says. “All the people who speak about me, they can’t do it. People speak about the imperialism of the American cinema. It is true, but there is a certain efficiency to American cinema that is a good thing, and we should try to have that as well.”

More than anything, Idrissa wants his work to be seen not as African film but as simply film. “When I do some of these things, people say, ‘Stop, you are becoming white,’ but I think cinema has no color. When I use French actors in one of my films, people wanted to kill me, they said, ‘It is not African cinema.’

“But to me African cinema is a ghetto. When people think of African films, they want to see huts, they won’t let Africans show something different. But Africa is not one country, it is a continent, and filmmakers are not alike, we are not the same. Even two American filmmakers do not have the same sensibility. Filmmaking is the personal thing you give to the world. You don’t give your country or your continent, you give yourself.”

These issues aside, what remains most astonishing about FESPACO is how completely unlikely it is that this desperately poor country, with a life expectancy of under 50 and a literacy rate of 15%, so underdeveloped that the U.N.’s Human Development Report ranked it 170 out of 173 countries, should have become the polished host of an event of this scale.

And, in truth, when the festival began in 1969 as a small, informal Week of African Cinema showing but 23 films, no one dreamed it would. But, says Kabore, who besides directing has for the past decade been the secretary general of FEPACI, the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, “a conjunction of many desires, events and phenomena” gradually transformed what had begun as little more than a gathering of friends.

The first event was a 1970 conflict between the government of what was then Upper Volta and the French companies in charge of film distribution and exhibition that resulted in an unprecedented state decision to nationalize those functions.

“It was a revolutionary thing, nobody thought that cinema could interest a government to such a point,” remembers Kabore, a vibrant, thoughtful man of 43. “Many countries sent secret missions to know how we did this. The French retaliated by deciding not to furnish films, and we sent people to French-speaking places like Belgium and Algeria to buy them. It was like a little war.

“Eventually the French were obliged to re-establish the relationship, but those events gave us a kind of image in the world, that of a little country that, despite being one of the poorest, was the most interested in cinema and culture. So many things came from that.”

The next event giving FESPACO a boost on the world film scene was a military coup in Upper Volta in 1983 that brought a charismatic 34-year-old army captain named Thomas Sankara to power. A committed, innovative Marxist revolutionary, Sankara turned the country upside down, striking out against corruption and making childhood health and women’s rights priorities. He sold off the government’s fleet of official Mercedes, personally wrote a new national anthem, and changed the country’s name to Burkina Faso, a combination of words in More and Dioula that together mean “land of honest, upright men.”

Sankara saw the potential of FESPACO and embraced it wholeheartedly, and his reputation as a kind of African Che Guevara made attendance at the event attractive on a wider scale. His policies, however, alienated the country’s Establishment (even his supporters concede that he made mistakes) and Sankara himself was overthrown and killed in another coup four years later, with his close friend and former co-revolutionary Blaise Compaore taking over as head of government, a position he still holds.

Although some African film makers have refused to return to FESPACO since Sankara’s assassination, FEPACI’s Kabore has another point of view. Though “people from abroad thought Sankara created FESPACO, it was already established as a national concern when he came. He gave it a new impetus, brought a new vision, but cinema in Burkina does not belong to one government or one president. It is part of the patrimony of our country.”

And, in addition to hosting FESPACO (with funding coming from the government and more than 15 international partners) and being the headquarters for FEPACI, Burkina has gradually increased its commitment to film, even passing legislation providing for an admission tax on non-African films to help finance domestic production. One of Africa’s few film schools is located in Ouaga, the city has dedicated a large, Claes Oldenburg-type monument of a camera and reels of film to African filmmakers, and one of the main events of this year’s FESPACO was the opening of the continent’s only climate-controlled film archive and library.

And FESPACO is hardly prepared to rest on its accomplishments. Feeling that “it is a pity that if a film is finished 10 days after FESPACO it has to wait two years,” secretary general Sawadogo hopes to turn the festival into an annual event by 2000. “This would dynamize our industry, and as you say in the West, life is too short to wait to do something. The highway of information is coming, and we have to be present at some stops. Africa has 750 million inhabitants, and we must give our own images to the world.”