After several decades of colonial cinema using Africa as an exotic setting – often denying humanity and dignity to its people – and 70 years after the invention of the cinema, freshly independent Africans take hold at long last of that movie-camera which had been forbidden to them for so long. Despite a total lack of means and infrastructures, and filming against all odds, using by chance any African or foreign support, they try to show African reality in its variegated forms, as it is seen at last through African eyes. Using large extracts from the main films, interventions of filmakers, and rare vintage footage CAMERA D’AFRIQUE recalls the early 20 years of those new “author films”, created in Sub-Saharan Africa, which bear witness to an amazing thirst for showing and expressing themselves, never extinguished to this day.

Official Selection, Cannes Film Festival, 1983

Official Selection, Cannes Classics, 2019