FOUR hundred miles south of Timbuktu, where the Sahara gives way to the fertile Sahel, lies the fabled city of Ouagadougou, home of the Moro-Naba, King of the Mossi. The Mossi empire is no more, but once every two years pilgrims from every corner of Africa and beyond flock to this dusty city of palms and bougainvilleas to celebrate a festival unrivaled anywhere on the continent.
This year, from Feb. 24 to March 3, Fespaco, the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television, transformed the capital into an offbeat third-world Cannes. Burkinabe directors debarked from black Mercedeses and were frantically kiss-kissed by dozens of their very closest friends. French producers and Senegalese journalists collared each other by the pool at the Hotel de l'Independance to debate the merits of films they hadn't seen. Scouts from M-Net, the South African cable television channel, cursed their useless cell phones; the network was overloaded. In the crowd outside Cinema Burkina, gorgeous Swedish tourists and gorgeous Ivorian actors gave one another the eye.
"Fespaco is my life," the Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko said as he was mobbed by fans and journalists after the premiere of his movie "Battu" ("Beaten").
Fespaco (the French acronym for the festival's name) started in 1969, when a group of African film enthusiasts put it together with the help of Ouagadougou's French Cultural Center. Since then, it has established itself as the premiere African film and video event. On a continent whose countries often lack firm identities, Fespaco has defined Burkina Faso as "the land of cinema." More than 200 films were shown this year, with 19 features competing for first prize -- the Stallion of Yannenga, won by the Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch for "Ali Zaoua." (Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese filmmaker and pipe-smoking eminence grise, kept his latest film out of competition to give younger directors a chance.)
The filmgoing experience here is far different from that at Toronto, Sundance or Cannes. While there are two top-drawer indoor cinemas in Ouagadougou, the others are aging open-air amphitheaters with colonial-era facades. The city's stadiums are used during the festival as well, with giant inflatable screens set up on the fields. In the cheap seats, the crowds pack in until they press against the steel grilles; soldiers patrol to make sure that nobody jumps the fence into the V.I.P. section. At the opening ceremony, the crowd hooted at a politician's oration, then set their programs on fire, waving them in the air. At week's end, the elegant awards ceremony was interrupted when water fights broke out in the bleachers.
Screenings in theaters, where tickets cost up to $1.50 -- pricey for most locals -- are more decorous. It's an art-house crowd composed of European third-world aficionados and African intelligentsia. But the films at Fespaco are as diverse as the audience -- or as Africa itself: there are films from French and English-speaking West African countries, Ethiopia, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa and from the Arab countries of North Africa. And they are almost all, at some level, political.
There are, for example, populist dramas about beggars and street children, like Mr. Sissoko's "Battu" and Mr. Ayouch's "Ali Zaoua." There are sword-and-sorcery adventures with political subtexts, like Dani Kouyate's "Sia: Le Reve du Python" ("The Dream of the Python") and Roger N'Gnoan M'Bala's "Adanggaman." There are political documentaries, like the Haitian director Raoul Peck's "Lumumba" and the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's "Vacances au Pays" ("Vacation in the Country"). And there are contemporary comedies addressing social issues, like the superb shorts of the Burkinabe feminist director Regina Fanta Nacro.
"Over the last 25 years, there's been a greater diversity in the themes of African cinema," said the renowned Burkinabe director Gaston Kabore. But, he said, "there are recurrent themes."
"In African cinema, we're always looking for our place between tradition and modernity," he continued. "We draw fuel from our past to confront the future."
THAT siphoning operation sometimes produces movies that seem bizarre to non-African viewers. Mr. Kouyate's film "Sia," with its often flat acting and its gladiator costumes, found few admirers among the Euro-American contingent but proved popular with the African audience. It won a special jury prize.
"At the first screening," said Mr. Kouyate, "when the soldiers kill the madman" -- a holy fool who denounces the evil emperor -- "someone in the crowd shouted out 'Norbert Zongo!'" (Zongo, a popular Burkinabe opposition journalist, was murdered in 1998, allegedly by forces close to President Blaise Compaore.) Furthermore, Mr. Kouyate added, "the film attacks the most holy myth of the Songhai people -- it denies the existence of the python god."
In African film, there is politics and there is magic -- the two sometimes improbably intertwined. Mr. Sissoko's "Battu" resembles socialist cinema of the 60's, but it features marabouts -- Muslim spiritual seers -- who cast spells and predict the future. Ms. Fanta Nacro's "Bintou," which won best short, is a hilarious and realistic tale of a poor woman's empowerment, punctuated by an episode in which the heroine casts a spell on her husband. Might this magical-realist cinema engage be the future of African movies?
Mr. Kabore said that it's too soon to define the trends in African film -- what has been called "the youngest cinema in the world." "There hasn't been enough production," he said. Besides, "there are few people who've seen lots of African films, because of distribution reasons. One only sees them at festivals."
Distribution problems have become a standard topic at Fespaco. "There are problems at every level," said Valerie Mouroux of Ecrans Nord-Sud, a French nonprofit organization that creates networks for distributing African films. "The 'cultural' movie theaters in France have less and less room for non-French, non-American films." And in Africa there is no distribution for local films. The directors themselves often go from theater to theater hawking their movies.
Even with better distribution, it's not clear how many Africans would see the films. Africa boasts a bewildering variety of languages, and a Burkinabe film shot in Mossi won't do well in a Baoule area of Ivory Coast. Subtitling is of limited use in countries with 40 percent literacy rates. Movie theaters, meanwhile, are shabby and far between. "At independence" -- in 1960 -- "Cameroon had 40 or 50 cinemas," says Ms. Mouroux. "Now there are seven."
The Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouedraogo said, "There's no point kidding ourselves: 90 percent of our population lives in villages without electricity, without cinemas, without video." Mr. Ouedraogo is probably the most popular of the younger generation of Burkinabe filmmakers -- and here it's the directors, not the actors, who are stars. His film "Tilai" won best feature at Fespaco in 1991; last year he produced a television series, "Kady Jolie" ("Pretty Kady") which brought him even closer to a mass audience.
One of the more amazing things about Burkina Faso, the land of cinema, is that the average street tough in this bitterly poor country is likely to have a favorite director, and for many it's Mr. Ouedraogo. "He addresses the problems we cope with today," said Abdoulaye Konfe, a 25-year-old university student. A taxi driver, Adama Diallou, said, "It's African life, the way we really live it."
Still, Mr. Ouedraogo doesn't think his films are reaching the nonurban majority. "For the moment we're not shooting for a wide audience, because it doesn't exist," he said. "So you have to turn outside your country."
For French-speaking Africa, that has traditionally meant France. "Of the 14 French-language features in this year's Fespaco, 13 were realized with our help," says Jean-Claude Crepeau, director of Cinema and Media at the Intergovernmental Agency of the Francophonie (Agence Intergouvernmentale de la Francophonie). The agency also provides $130,000 of Fespaco's $1 million budget. And the Culture Ministry of the French government subsidizes French movie production; African producers can access these funds if they know how. "You have to have French actors, French technicians, French postproduction," said Mr. Crepeau. Another major backer of French-speaking African film is the French cable television channel Canal Plus, whose Canal Plus Horizons subsidiary broadcasts throughout Africa.
French-speaking African cinema receives French subsidies; English-speaking African cinema does not, and it has to some extent been shut out of the French-speaking scene. John Riber, one of the few white filmmakers at the festival, has been making English-language movies in Zimbabwe for more than 10 years, but he's at Fespaco for the first time. His comedy, "Yellow Card," is a sort of black township "Beverly Hills 90210." Mr. Riber said he knew nothing about distribution in French-speaking West Africa, whereas he knows distribution in English-speaking Southern and Eastern Africa -- Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa -- inside out.
As if African cinema weren't already balkanized enough, there's a big difference, for example, between English-speaking Southern African cinema and English-speaking West African cinema. In West Africa -- Ghana and Nigeria -- the lack of subsidies has forced local filmmakers to turn to the cheaper technology of video. As movie theaters in those countries closed down over the last 20 years, video clubs began springing up, charging less than 10 cents for admission. Local filmmakers began producing for this market. Ghana and Nigeria now have thriving video industries, churning out lurid low-fi sagas of witchcraft, adultery and gang warfare. A sampling of the titles of Ghanaian and Nigerian entries at Fespaco tells the story: "Rage," "Power," "Over My Dead Body."
But unlike Burkinabe movies, Ghanaian and Nigerian movies generally turn a profit, even though they're pirated within days. "They make a film for $8,000 and gross $10,000," said Mr. Riber. "It's great."
Ghanaian and Nigerian films were more in evidence at the traditionally French-oriented Fespaco this year. One factor pushing Africa's French- and English-speaking cinemas to consolidate their efforts is an increasing financial squeeze. "There's less and less money, since the 90's," said Mr. Kabore. Television chains like the British Channel 4 and the German ZDF have stopped pre-buying African films. "That resulted in a drop in production, which shows how dependent our cinema was on the outside."
Mr. Kabore is a realist when it comes to audiences -- his film "Buud Yam," with 600,000 tickets sold to date, is the most popular African film ever in Burkina Faso -- and he doesn't think the financial pressure is necessarily bad. "It makes us ask the question, who are we making these films for? And it pushes us to take a hard look at new technologies, namely digital."
Cheap digital video may just change the shape of African film. Nominally, "New Technologies" was the theme of this year's Fespaco. But the "New Technologies" salon at the Hotel de l'Independance had only five booths representing only two technology companies. It was one of the realities of Fespaco that remind you that you're in Africa. There are the youngsters pursuing you as you walk down the street, hawking handmade wire toys. There's the Sahel heat, 105 degrees at midday. There's the flock of longhorned sheep blocking your taxi as you race to a premiere, the red dust blowing in off the desert, the women carrying trays of strawberries on their heads. There's the schedule of screenings that doesn't come out until the second day of the festival. There are the showings canceled because the directors are stuck in Paris, a festival representative having neglected to confirm Air Afrique reservations.
And there's the improvisational spirit with which everything seems to work out in the end. Anyway, Cheick Oumar Sissoko was sure he knew why those rival directors had missed their plane. "I am responsible for the fact that Pierre Yameogo is not here," Mr. Sissoko said at his "Battu" premiere. Mr. Yameogo's film was expected to be very strong in competition, "so my marabout has blocked him in Paris."
GRAPHIC: Photos: African slaves in chains in Roger N'Gnoan M'Bala's "Adanggaman." (Associated Press)(pg. 22); (Cinecom)(pg. 1)