Tahar Cheriaa: Chronicles of a Pan-African Pioneer

Founder of Africa’s first film festival, the Carthage Film Festival (Journées cinématographiques de Carthage, or JCC), which had its inaugural edition in Tunisia in 1966 and is still going strong today, Tahar Cheriaa’s discriminating eye for talent and unwavering support of it whenever and wherever he found it has led many to dub him the Father of Pan-African Cinema. Timed to the 60th anniversary of the JCC, this series commemorates Cheriaa’s superhuman efforts to bring together key figures in postcolonial African cinema across vast linguistic and geographical divides, and the instrumental role he played in nurturing the careers of figures like Senegal’s Ousmane Sembéne and Djibril Diop Mambéty, Egypt’s Tewfik Saleh, Cameroon’s Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, Lebanon’s Heiny Srour, and too many others to mention.

“Tahar Cheriaa and Ousmane Sembene met in 1966 at the Cannes Film Festival and immediately formed a close friendship. They chose to work together so their continent could develop an auteur-driven, politically committed cinema—one that could help free Africa from its colonial past and, through images, enable the largely illiterate population of the time to shape their own destiny. This marked the birth of cinematic Pan-Africanism, a movement embraced by many pioneers: Moustapha Alassane, Med Hondo, Tewfik Salah, Sarah Maldoror, Lionel Ngakane, Jean-Michel Tchissoukou… In this spirit were created JCC, FESPACO, and FEPACI, and thanks to these initiatives, African film heritage today boasts works of great artistic power that speak to all of humanity. This ‘posthumous’ carte blanche honoring Cheriaa symbolically brings these pioneers together for today’s audiences, highlighting how essential Arab-African solidarity and fraternity were in making these cinematic jewels not only works of great beauty, but also a collective song in the search for freedom and dignity.” —Mohamed Challouf, director of Tahar Cheriaa: Under the Shadow of the Baobab, and film curator

In collaboration with the Princeton French Film Festival. With the support of Villa Albertine and the International Organization of La Francophonie

With a special presentation of Touki Bouki by Jollof Films