The Country That Nationalised Its Screens
In 1970 Upper Volta took over the distribution and exhibition of film across the whole country — the halls, the bookings, the box office — and the two French companies that had supplied West African screens for decades cut off the supply in response. The festival that decision paid for is still running every other year; the cinemas it was built on are almost all gone.
The first one opened on 1 February 1969 and ran a fortnight. It was called the Semaine du cinéma africain, its organising committee was chaired by Alimata Salembéré, then a young producer at Voltaic television, and it showed films from five African countries alongside a couple of European ones in a capital with a handful of theatres and no film industry of any kind. There was no competition and no prize. Nobody involved was founding an institution.
What turned it into one happened the following year and had nothing to do with programming. In 1970 the government of Upper Volta nationalised the distribution and exhibition of film across the country — the halls, the bookings, the box office — and put a state company in charge of them. Fifty-six years later the festival that decision paid for is still held every odd-numbered year, in a country whose government does not control all of its own territory, and the screens it was built on have almost all closed.
Who owned the screens
Two companies did. COMACICO and SECMA — the Compagnie africaine cinématographique industrielle et commerciale and the Société d'exploitation cinématographique africaine — were French-owned and Paris-run, and between them they held the great majority of cinemas across francophone West and Central Africa, from Dakar to Douala. They owned or leased the halls, bought programmes as a block in Europe, and moved the takings out. The result was not a shortage of films. It was that the films were chosen on another continent for a market treated as one undifferentiated distribution zone, and a West African director with a finished picture had no commercial route onto a West African screen. That, rather than money or equipment, was the standing complaint of the entire first generation of directors on the continent.
What the state bought
Upper Volta went first. The state took distribution and exhibition into its own hands and created a national company, SONAVOCI, to hold them; the two French firms responded by cutting off supply, and for a period Voltaic cinemas struggled to get anything at all to show. The government did not reverse it. Others followed on the same reasoning — Mali took distribution into state hands too, Senegal set up the SIDEC distribution body in 1974 — but Ouagadougou had moved first and had a festival already running to point the machinery at. What the circuit generated was never a large amount of money. It was a stream: ticket receipts and the tax on them staying in the country instead of leaving it, and a state that owned the halls the festival needed for a fortnight every other year and did not have to ask anyone for them.
A festival is a fortnight of programming. A distribution network is a country deciding which images its citizens can see for the other fifty weeks. Ouagadougou worked out that the second one had to come first.
What got built on top of it
In 1972 the week acquired a name, a decree and a competition: the Festival panafricain du cinéma de Ouagadougou, biennial, with a grand prize called the Étalon de Yennenga after the princess of Mossi legend whose stallion carried her out of her father's kingdom and whose son is held to have founded the Mossi states. The first one went to Oumarou Ganda of Niger for Le Wazzou polygame. A film school, INAFEC, opened in Ouagadougou in 1976 and trained a generation of West African technicians before it closed in 1987. The Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, founded in Algiers in 1969, moved its secretariat here in the 1980s. Thomas Sankara, president from 1983 until he was killed in October 1987, treated the festival as state business, and the monument raised on a roundabout in the middle of the capital in 1987 is a monument to film directors, which is not a thing most capitals have. The Cinémathèque africaine opened in 1989 and holds one of the few substantial film archives on the continent. And the films came: Gaston Kaboré's Wend Kuuni in 1982, Idrissa Ouédraogo's Yaaba in 1989 and then Tilaï, which took the jury's Grand Prix at Cannes in 1990 — made by Burkinabè directors, in a country of fewer than ten million people, with a per-head income near the bottom of every table published.
And then the circuit was sold
The reversal took about twenty years and was mostly not about cinema at all. Structural adjustment from the early 1990s required states across the region to get out of commercial enterprises, and national film companies were precisely the sort of thing those programmes were aimed at. The Burkinabè company — renamed SONACIB after the country changed its name in 1984 — was pushed towards privatisation, ran at a loss and was liquidated in the 2000s; the halls were sold, leased, converted to other uses or simply shut. What finished them was not policy but the video cassette, then the VCD, then the satellite dish, then the phone. Ouagadougou, which had run a working municipal circuit, ended up staging the largest film festival on the continent across a handful of screens: Ciné Burkina and Ciné Neerwaya carry most of it, and the rest goes to open-air projections in the neighbourhoods and a ceremony in a stadium.
The residue
That leaves an odd object. The festival is not sustained by a national exhibition industry, because there is not one. It is sustained by the state, by co-funders, and by the fact that it has been the place African cinema meets for more than fifty years and no rival ever quite established itself. It has kept its slot through things that would have cancelled most events: the insurrection that removed Blaise Compaoré in October 2014, the attempted coup of September 2015, the January 2016 attack on a hotel and café on Avenue Kwame Nkrumah that killed thirty people, two coups in 2022, and a security crisis that has put much of the country beyond government control. The 2019 edition was the fiftieth anniversary. The 2023 and 2025 editions went ahead. The market attached to it, MICA, is where films from the continent are actually bought and sold, and the Institut Imagine, the training and production centre Gaston Kaboré opened in Ouagadougou in 2003, teaches the crafts on the continent so that a West African film does not have to go to Europe for everything that happens after the shoot.
The lesson usually drawn from Ouagadougou is about prestige — a poor country punching above its weight. The more useful one is about plumbing. A festival is cheap and a distribution network is not, and it was the expensive thing that made the cheap one durable: twenty years of owning the screens bought an archive, a school, a federation, a monument on a roundabout and a habit that has now outlasted the screens by longer than it had them. When people in Ouagadougou talk about rebuilding cinemas, and they do, that is the argument they are having — not nostalgia for a hall, but whether the thing underneath the festival can be put back.