Albert Samama Chikli was an obscure name lost in the course of history. The Tunisian filmmaker was a pioneer and groundbreaker. But his terrific oeuvre remained next to non-existent for long.
It was 10 years ago Aboubakar Sanogo stumbled upon the elusive figure that set him on a long painstaking quest. “I was researching African documentaries and there he was, buried in the pages of some reference journal, with absolutely no data on the extent of work he did,” says the film scholar and curator, who is part of the international jury.
What followed was a tenacious expedition that took him from Ottawa to Tunisia and Italy, tracking down the family of the late filmmaker. “They looked at me as if I am was coming from another planet and I couldn’t procure any document from there. Later I put a research team together and started scouring through every possible repository. And finally we did find films, some from French army archive and some from unknown production houses in France and Britain. We assembled a beautiful series of his films and screened it at a festival. It turned out to be the event-of-the-fete and suddenly everybody was talking about Chikli. When I started the research nobody knew him and now the whole world was discussing his subjects and style. This is the kind of pleasure I get from my work,” he says .
Currently involved in African Film Heritage Project, Sanogo says his job is all about exhuming unrecognised heroes and placing them back at the pantheon of cinema. “As part of the project we are engaged in unearthing and showcasing the cinematic history of Africa. So you work at various levels, including transmission, pedagogy, and cross-cultural communication,” he says. He thinks research is something that often turns into curatorial process. “At first you don’t know whether the films you recovered will resonate with a modern audience. But, very often, these works leave the audience mesmerised,” Sanogo adds.
He believes documenting the African experience, both politically and artistically, is very important, “while the film history of certain countries and cultures are well recorded, you encounter a big void when it comes to parts like Africa.”
As a researcher he feels exposing long-lost names to global vicinity is integral as African film history is very incomplete in many ways. “In Kerala, you are aware of the 90 years of Malayalam cinema and the transmission is possible from one generation to other. But in Africa the filmmakers are mostly influenced by films from Japan, Russia and India, which is quite natural. At the same time they are not sufficiently inspired by the aesthetic wealth of African films which I find a problem. I tell them they can love their Tarkovsky and Kurosawa, but they should also include some African films in their inventory,” he says.
