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Inaugurated in 1968, the Tashkent Festival of Cinema of Africa and Asia was attended by actors, directors and storytellers from newly independent nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. 

The festival inspired wide-ranging ideological debates — from the meaning of statehood to the purpose of dissent — and provided a critical space for second- and third-world cinema to articulate its own style beyond the limits of colonial inheritance.

Today, when cinema operates as critical vein for the diffusion of jingoistic, ethnonationalist, and imperial content, the conmemoration of the Tashkent Festival can remind us of cinema’s revolutionary power.

Drawing from Dr Masha Salazkina’s acclaimed World Socialist Cinema, Issue #72 examines how Tashkent film festival facilitated African cinema's emergence on the international stage as a form of anti-colonial resistance. 

Dr Salazkina is a film and media studies professor at Concordia University, Canada. World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (2023) is her most recent work.

The late 1960s was a pivotal moment for sub-Saharan African cinema, marking its arrival on the international scene as a continental phenomenon. The development of filmmaking itself was inseparable from that of the festival circuit, which was explicitly designed to support it. As Lindiwe Dovey remarks, these festivals “burst onto the scene in the 1960s as significant acts of cultural and political resistance, liberation and self-empowerment, inspiring discussions and debates about Africa, African film, African filmmakers, and African aesthetics on African soil.” Between 1966 and 1970, such events included the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (Senegal) and the 1969 Pan-African cultural festival of Algiers in Algeria, both of which featured film screenings and participating directors. As we have seen, this was also the foundational moment for the two long-standing film festivals in Africa—the JCC (Carthage) and FESPACO (Ouagadougou). The Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) was established, spearheaded first as part of the UNESCO sponsored roundtable on African film and television at JCC ’68, just a few days prior to the Tashkent opening, and inaugurated at the next JCC session in 1970. Thus, the presentation of sub-Saharan Africa at Tashkent comes in the crucial moment when, on the one hand, the organizational urgency for the filmmakers and producers was directed toward the creation of an African-specific network and African audiences, and, on the other hand, it also became possible to demonstrate the vitality of this cinema internationally. 

As Rachel Gabara points out, the scholarly tendency to focus on African feature films has resulted in ignoring a whole body of documentary work produced in the early 1960s, such as Paulin Vieyra’s A Nation Is Born (Une nation est née: La République du Sénégal, 1961), which won a prize at the inaugural Symposium of Young and Emerging Cinemas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America at Karlovy Vary in 1962, therefore recasting the historical time line of African filmmaking. These were the films that found early exhibition venues within the Soviet sphere, culminating in Tashkent’s African program. The breadth of Tashkent’s range of cinematic forms constituting the festival program (which included institutional and state-produced nonfiction) is precisely what allowed for a particularly extensive showcase of African cinema. And Soviet willingness to cover the expenses of the invited guests assured the unusually wide participation of African filmmakers and functionaries and their warm reception. And the festival offered a particularly useful forum for establishing international networks. Given the urgency of establishing cultural infrastructure free from colonial legacies, in the late 1960s and early 1970s many sub-Saharan African filmmakers shared Cheriaa’s conviction that the way to economic independence was through partial or full national control of the film industry, in particular its distribution. The Soviet bloc offered more accommodating platforms through which to explore such possibilities than the largely private European or American studio and distribution system—especially as it offered training in the technical, artistic, economic, and administrative aspects of filmmaking.

With the exception of South Africa, colonial state organizations (Colonial Film Units, French government film commissions, and the like) had traditionally governed sub-Saharan African film production. Feature fiction filmmaking had no precedent within that preexisting infrastructure, thus setting it up in postcolonial states requiring considerable support, not only for production but also artistic and technical training. While some basic training had been offered through the British Colonial Film Unit, and IDHEC in France offered job training to African film students, there had been little to no film educational opportunities or schools Tashkent 1968 based in sub-Saharan Africa. Filmmakers were outspoken about the problem of African cinema’s inevitable dependency on international support and cooperation, given the lack of proper infrastructural development. Since the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had offered massive “unconditional assistance” for the development of professional cadres for Asian and African comrades, which included fully funded scholarships and special language training programs. While Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow became the destination educational institution for students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the Moscow Film School VGIK was likewise offering opportunities for international study, which were taken up by around one hundred students from Africa between 1960 and 1989. Leningrad film school (LIKI), Film Faculty of the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, the School of Documentary Cinema of GDR, and the National School of Cinema in Lodz, Poland, also accepted students.

To avoid becoming too dependent on any one side (West or East) for assistance, most African postcolonial states adopted the strategy of diversifying their sources of support.107 A good example of this is Senegal, a nation that was far from being within the Soviet sphere. Léopold Sédar Senghor, the head of the Senegalese state, was a staunch opponent of socialist reforms and was supported largely by France and the US. For Senegalese filmmakers, however, the Soviet bloc was often the better choice, a respite from France, with its soft power over newly decolonized Francophone Africa, and a promise of a more egalitarian society. Unlike French institutions, their Soviet counterparts offered a clean slate with considerably more financial assistance and no explicit expectation about the outcome of training or later control over the cinematic production of the African filmmakers they supported. 

SOVIET-AFRICAN CINEMATIC EXCHANGES 

Thus, by 1968, key figures of the emerging African cinema had already established contacts in the Soviet Union: the most important were Guinea’s Bob Sow (Sowfu) and Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. A special intermediary role was also played by Sarah Maldoror. Maldoror was French, of Guadalupe parentage, and would make her most famous films in Algeria, Guinea-Bissau and Congo-Brazzaville, funded by the national liberation movement of Mozambique, FRELIMO. These filmmakers had already achieved successful artistic careers before their arrival in the Soviet Union (Sow and Vieyra as filmmakers, Sembene as a writer, and Maldoror as a theater actress and director in France). They did not therefore pursue a full course of study at VGIK (which took at least five years), but they did attend classes and conduct internships (or stage) in Soviet film studios, which gave them an opportunity to gain direct filmmaking experience. 

Sow was one of the first cineastes to take advantage of this option: in 1959, less than a year after Guinea achieved independence, he, as the head of Guinea’s newly nationalized film industry, went to Moscow to practice filmmaking under the supervision of Alexander Medvedkin. After this, he returned to Guinea, where he resumed his role as head of distribution for the State Film Company, SyliCinema. His job was sourcing films directly from distributors, mostly from the socialist bloc, to be screened in both private and public sectors, thus effectively supplanting the two French companies that controlled distribution before Guinean independence. Thus, Sovexportfilm and its Eastern European equivalents played a crucial role in resolving the problem of control over distribution, famously deemed the first step toward achieving independence of the African film sector. Sow died in the 1970s, after years of mediating between Guinean film production and the Soviet Union, leading to Guinean students becoming, along with Ethiopia’s, the most numerous at VGIK.

Vieyra was another key institutional figure in the Soviet-African nexus. Film scholar and filmmaker as well as an important producer in his role as head of a national newsreel service, Actualités Sénégalaises, and one of the cofounders of both FESPACO and FEPACI, his experience in the Soviet Union dated back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students. In his account of the festival’s film screenings and discussions in his 1969 volume Le cinéma et l’Afrique, Vieyra describes their formative impact on him as a filmmaker and critic. He visited the Soviet Union again in 1962, this time as a cameraman documenting the Senegalese prime minister Mamadou Dia’s visit to Moscow, Leningrad, and Tashkent (as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary), which allowed him to reconnect with his friend Sembene, who was studying in Moscow during that period. 

Both Sembene and Vieyra repeatedly articulated the importance of the Soviet film sphere as the meeting place for African filmmakers and artists and the opportunity to see the films of his African colleagues. In his book, he favorably compared the festival in Moscow to an African film festival in Lille in which he participated just a few months later, contrasting both the “Soviet kindness and hospitality” and the wide range of countries represented there to the openly paternalistic (toward its African participants) tone of the Lille event and its implicit prohibition of political discussions. Vieyra was a regular participant at Tashkent, where he claimed to have had his first chance to see films from Ghana and Somalia in 1968 and, in 1972, to have seen the celebrated Soleil O, by Mel Hondo. This claim is striking since Vieyra was extremely active on the African film festival circuit in Europe and, alongside Cheriaa and Sembene was directly involved in the establishment of FESPACO. Yet many of the films he discusses in Le cinéma africain—and, in doing so, laying the foundation for African film history discourses for generations to come—he saw first in Tashkent.

If Sembene saw himself first as a writer, Vieyra could be rightfully called the first historian and critic of sub-Saharan African cinema. Both were attracted by the broadly based literary and artistic curriculum of the Soviet film schools and were keen to promote criticism and history as a crucial part of film culture. In his published work, Vieyra not only surveys the broadest range of African cinematic expression of the time but often offers uncompromisingly sharp critiques of African films he sees as failing in their aesthetic pursuit. As Dovey notes, in his earliest writings, Vieyra somewhat surprisingly singles out Czech films as exemplary for their “human qualities: youth, freshness, spontaneity,” and for the “singular power of their images” and their “psychological and emotional density.” Evidencing the importance of aesthetic criteria for the early development of African cinemas, as well as the wide range of international styles that shaped it, Vieyra’s writing underscores a truly cosmopolitan cinematic formation. Transcending the ideological position by which these foundational figures of African cinema are usually discussed, their openness and exposure to a wide variety of international cinemas was ultimately greater than that of many of their more celebrated Western counterparts, and their active participation at the socialist bloc’s film circuit further allowed for a considerably broader global outlook.

Vieyra’s collaborator and friend Ousmane Sembene was without a doubt the most visible figure in establishing and maintaining the Soviet-African nexus. The Soviet view of the two is expressed in a volume dedicated to the cinemas represented at the Tashkent festival: the section on Sembene bears the title of “Father of African Cinema” and on Vieyra “The Pioneer of African Cinema.” Originally sent to Prague by the Communist Party of France, of which he was a member, Sembene participated in the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers Congress, together with Mario Pinto de Andrade, Angolan poet and politician, who was the founder of the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and its first president, his Mozambican counterpart—the poet and FRELIMO politician Marcelino dos Santos. Sembene knew de Andrade from Paris, where as the editor of Présence Africaine he had published Sembene’s first story; they were part of the same communist literary circle involved in political organizing of Africans in France around the liberation struggles in Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde (Sembene founded the Marseille chapter of PAIGC in 1958).

In From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, Rossen Djagalov gives a compelling account of the Afro-Asian Writers Congress in the creation and promotion of Soviet-Afro-Asian cultural dialogue and draws out the continuities between the 1958 literary event and its accompanying film festival and the 1968 Tashkent film festival. After his participation at the Writers Congress, Sembene returned to Moscow in 1962 to be trained at the Gorky Film Studio, where he spent nine months under the tutelage of Mark Donskoi, who also led the workshops at VGIK that Sembene attended. During the 1960s, Sembene continued not only to make films (and write novels), but also, alongside Cheriaa and Vieyra, played a key role in the creation of the pan-African cinematic networks: as president of the Jury at Carthage in 1968 and a leading figure in both FESPACO and FEPACI. Given these roles, his participation in the events organized in the Soviet Union further demonstrate their importance for the endogenous African film industry. At Tashkent he presented The Money Order (Mandabi, 1968), his first feature film made in Senegal in the Wolof language—but funded by the French National Cinema Center and coproduced with his own company, Domirev, and Comptoir Français du Film Production (CFFP). Mandabi quickly became an international sensation, winning the special jury prize at Venice the same year and shown around the World as the prime example of cinema emerging from sub-Saharan Africa. 

As the most widely internationally recognized African filmmaker of that period, he toured widely in Europe and the US, successfully navigating the Cold War divides. In a 1972 Film Quarterly interview, he remarked that he didn’t speak of his experiences in Russia when in America, just as he didn’t speak of his American experiences when in Russia—pointing to a sort of diplomatic code that kept him internationally connected. This was generally true, but he was always outspoken on the subject of imperialist wars and the US’s role in them; thus, in a 1973 interview with Jeune Afrique, when he was asked about the future of Africa, he responded: “The thing that I hope for above all is that the Vietnam War ends. I can no more forget Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, South Guinea, or the Palestinians. Behind all of it one finds American power. I think Africa can change many things in all of these conflicts. It would be enough to not keep silent.” 

Similar motivations led Maldoror to accept a scholarship to study filmmaking in the USSR: together with Sembene, she was part of Donskoi’s VGIK workshop in 1961 and 1962. Maldoror had already established a reputation in French theater as one of the founders—along with Ivorian filmmaker Timité Bassori, Ababacar Samb Makharam, and Toto Bissainthe—of the first Black theater company in Tashkent 1968 79 France: Les Griots. In addition to studying Russian and attending VGIK workshops, she also served in Moscow as assistant director on Donskoi’s film Hello, Children! (Zdravstvuite, deti!, 1962), an antiwar tear-jerker set at the famous Soviet international summer camp in Crimea, depicting the friendship of a group of children with a Japanese girl suffering effects from the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima. As the film included a multiracial cast of young actors, it is easy to imagine Donskoi’s motivation to include Maldoror on the work crew. After her two-year stay in the Soviet Union, Maldoror joined the pioneers of the African liberation movements in Guinea, Algeria, and Guinea-Bissau alongside her partner (and MPLA leader) de Andrade. In Algeria she worked as an assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo and William Klein. Her first short, Monangambee (1968), was funded in part by Algeria and received an award at the Carthage film festival, as did her first feature, Sambizanga in 1972 (filmed in Congo, with the participation of Congolese militants), which was also screened in Tashkent in 1974.

Maldoror’s achievement was quite unique: she was not only the only African woman filmmaker at that time but also a committed pan-Africanist-internationalist, whose goal was to make the African liberation struggles visible, on par with Vietnam, to the rest of the world. Her political position in Angola was openly aligned with the MPLA’s Marxist-Leninist (and Soviet-supported) orientation of the struggle. As Marissa Moorman asserts in her discussion of Sambizanga: “By 1966, three nationalist organizations, mentioned earlier, were fighting against the Portuguese in Angola. Anticolonial sentiment may have been unequivocal but the implications of this in terms of national rule and national affect were not. Therefore, when Sambizanga won the grand prize at the Carthage film festival in 1972, it was not only a show of support for the Angolan independence struggle generally but for a particular interpretation of that struggle and for the MPLA as the legitimate representative of the Angolan people.”

In the heated moment of armed struggle preceding the 1975 victory, international solidarity through consciousness-raising was an important focal point for these African revolutionaries fighting not only against colonialism but for socialism—and for this, Tashkent provided a perfect forum, making Maldoror its perfect spokesperson.

Excerpted from World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) with the permission of the author, Dr Masha Salazkina.

All images are courtesy of Dr Masha Salazkina.

The Internationalist Archive