ÉCU - THE EUROPEAN INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

What is African cinema and what characterizes it? This question seems to have thousands of possible answers. Due to the size of the country, it seems difficult to speak of „one African cinema“. To get us an insight into Africa’s world of film, we got the chance to talk with Machérie Ekwa Bahango. A young Congolese filmmaker — whose first film Maki’la premiered at the 2018 Berlinale. First studying law, Bahango transitioned to the cinema first in 2014, working as a production manager and later as a translator and writer for several productions. Maki’la is considered her directorial debut. Although Bahango could generate attention with her film, which also got awarded with the Golden Screen Award at the Black Screen Film Festival 2018, she herself is not really sure whether she can be described as a part of the film industry. In her words:  „I don't even know if I'm part of an industry, I'm still fighting to make my films exist, to produce them...I'll talk about the indu

  I'm coming home from a bar, it's raining cats and dogs outside but I can't shake off the warm feeling that settled in me after meeting my colleagues from the ÉCU office outside working hours. Colleagues isn't a fitting word for them anymore.   What are you going to do after this internship?  is a question everyone is fired at during the first lunch break. The answer is always quite vague.   Uncertainty is the word that collectively describes the interns at ÉCU. We live in a world full of possibilities and this freedom is liberating but making it even more difficult to choose, to decide. So we live day by day, focusing on our task in the office and in the afternoon ...   1. INT. – BAR NEAR CHATELET – NIGHT   A group of young people drinking beers. They don´t know each other that well but are friends because they don´t know anyone else in Paris.   ELSA You know I will try to stay in Paris at least for two more months … and then I want to do my Mas

After the second world war, the liberation of France led to the need — both as a collective and as an individual — being able to express oneself freely in the context of art and creation. Thus, the discussion about film and its discourse coming with that was of immense relevance for many artists as well as film enthusiasts. Among them — considered some of the most valuable at that time — were the film critic André Bazin and filmmaker, film critic and writer Alexandre Astruc. The latter published an article in 1948 about the transformation of cinema which would increasingly focus on a more personal form in which the camera functioned as a pen in the hands of the director. The article "Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera as Pen" was later to be considered the beginning of the New Wave development which includes the politique des auteurs as a decisive aspect. This — first defined in 1955 by the filmmaker François Truffaut for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma — understands in