Sub-Saharan Africa may be the most neglected group of film industries on the planet. That is why I take great pleasure in passing along this release from the Film Foundation and others:
THE FILM FOUNDATION’S WORLD CINEMA PROJECT, UNESCO, AND THE PAN AFRICAN FEDERATION OF FILMMAKERS (FEPACI) SIGN AGREEMENT TO RESTORE AFRICAN FILMS
NEW
YORK, NY (June 12, 2017) – Martin Scorsese, founder and chair of The
Film Foundation, Irina Bokova, the Director-General of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) and Aboubakar Sanogo, the North American Regional Secretary of
the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) joined together
Wednesday, June 7 to sign a letter of agreement formalizing their
partnership on the African Film Heritage Project, a
new initiative to preserve African cinema.
“I’m proud to be partnering with FEPACI and UNESCO on this critically important project,” said Martin Scorsese,
“and I’m excited to have already restored the first film of the
program. I believe that cinema is the perfect way to open up one’s mind
and curiosity and share different cultures with people around the world.
Working together, we can help ensure that Africa’s
richly diverse cinematic heritage will be preserved, restored, and made
available.”
In the context of
UNESCO’s International Coalition of Artists for the General History of
Africa, and working in association with their partner and FIAF member
archive Cineteca di Bologna, the project will
locate and restore an initial selection of 50 African films, identified
by FEPACI’s advisory board of African archivists, scholars and
filmmakers. Initially launched in February at the Pan-African Film
Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the alliance has completed
its first restoration: SOLEIL O (1969), directed by Med Hondo,
considered to be one of the founding fathers of African cinema. The
restoration premiered recently at the 70th Cannes Film Festival.
L-R:
Mahen Bonetti (Founder and Executive Director, African Film Festival
Inc.), Aboubakar Sanogo (North America Regional Secretary, FEPACI),
Martin Scorsese (Founder
and Chair of The Film Foundation), Irina Bokova (Director-General,
UNESCO), Yemane Demissie (Associate Professor, New York University)
Photo credit: Dave Alloca/ Starpix
Courtesy of The Film Foundation
An extensive survey
to locate the best existing film elements for each of the 50 films will
be conducted in African Cinémathèques and archives around the world.
Following restoration, these films will be distributed
worldwide at festivals, museums, universities and other venues and made
available via digital platforms and other formats.
**********
Much closer to home, the excellent avant-garde documentarian Lynne Sachs has an interesting program in collaboration/conjunction with fellow filmmaker Mark Street on view on Saturday, June 26 at the Microscope Gallery (1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B, Brooklyn). She can explain it better than I can:
Link to Microscope Gallery:
Link to Advance Tickets:
Both
of us have been making experimental films for more than three decades.
We've been together as a couple for almost that long. So it is with
curiosity and a tremor of fear that we embark on an unusual filmmaking project
that involves each of us remaking a few selected short films from the other's
body of work. The remake production process will start with picking
up the camera and reacting to the other person's selected films with a
combination of humor, insight, irony, pathos and perhaps critique.
We will screen some of our older short films along with new remakes of those
films (not shot-by-shot, but using the original film as inspiration). Lynne
may pick up on an element of Mark's film that he didn't even know was there!
Mark may choose to ignore the content of one of Lynne's films in favor of a
formal excavation. This will be an evening of doppelgangers, updates and sly
renovations. The films will be shown in tag team fashion: a clip from Lynne's completed 2001
film leads into Mark's 2017 remake; Mark's completed 2015 film is
followed by Lynne's 2017 remake and so on.
We will close out the program with a short film we
made together as the XY Chromosome Project, the collaborative project we
created in 2001. After the screening, we will invite a conversation about
form, context, time, gender and more -- contemplating the frisson that
emerges between an older work and its newer progeny.
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