Ouagadougou — Voyage a Ouaga (Journey to Ouaga) is the title of a movie in competition at the 17th edition of the pan African film festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. It is a comedy about a hapless and naïve Frenchman in Africa.
The cinema audience in Ouagdougou loved the film and immediately warmed to the character, who gets himself into all sorts of scrapes and is saved by his friendship with a young street kid, a shoeshine boy who takes the Frenchman under his wing. That was Journey to Ouaga, the fictional feature film.
Cut to a real life drama, which could go by the same title, and has been unfolding behind the scenes at the film festival in the Burkinabe capital since last week. It also have another title, The Sorry Tale of Missing Films and Filmmakers. Why? Because many films, and even more discouraged film-makers, have not been able to reach Ouagadougou and the film festival, through no fault of their own.
Mansour Sora Wade, a Senegalese film director, could have been one of them if he had not taken matters into his own hands and found his own way to Ouagadougou for Fespaco 2001.
Sora Wade, like a number of his fellow film-makers, is based in Paris and was expecting to leave the French capital on Saturday 24 February on a flight heading for Ouagadougou in time for the first day of the festival. Sora Wade takes up the story. "When we arrived at the airport in Paris, and there were about thirty-five or forty of us, we were told the plane was full and there were no more seats for us."
Sora Wade said there were several film-makers in the group, including some whose movies were meant to be in competition at Fespaco. They had their film reels on their trolleys, but wheeled them back out of the airport and went home when they were told they could not catch the flight. Two of the cineastes were Jean Odoutan from Benin and Serge Coelo from Chad - who was presenting 'Dar es Salam', the first feature film from his country to compete for a prize at Fespaco.
Audiences waited in vain for Coelo's film and for Odoutan's movie, Djib, to be screened in Ouagadougou this week. Odoutan even had a second film, Barbecue Pejo, in competition but the movies and their makers were still in Paris.
The Fespaco organizers have confirmed that about forty film-makers have not made it to Ouagadougou and four films competing in the feature-length category will not be shown. Fespaco has blamed the airline, Air Afrique, for the flight problems.
Fespaco respresentatives said Air Afrique had asked for half the tickets to be prepaid, but later insisted the whole amount be settled in advance. The continental African airline is currently in deep financial trouble and has recently had a shake-up at the top. The new American boss pledged to lay off personnel and improve performance and punctuality. Staff have gone on strike since the announcement.
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A Fespaco spokesman added that directors were asked to send their films in advance, but often waited to travel with the reels themselves, because they would otherwise have to pay freight charges and risk losing the films en route.
That is the story of those who did not make it to Ouaga. But that is not where the tale ends. We return to Mansour Sora Wade, the man who succeeded in his journey to Ouagadougou.
On Sunday, 25 February, the Senegalese film-maker eventually caught an evening flight from Paris, which was scheduled to fly to Niamey in Niger and onto the Malian capital Bamako - a little closer to Ouagadougou. The plane landed at Niamey at 2am and stayed in Niamey.
Sora Wade and two other film-makers decided they would continue by road to Burkina Faso. Their journey to Ouaga took eight hours. They left Niamey at 5am, making the 612km journey in record time, and arrived in the Burkinabe capital in time for lunch.
Sora Wade said he does not blame the Fespaco organizers for the mess-up, but concludes that, in future, planes should be chartered to fly film-makers direct to Ouagadougou, to avoid confusion and missed flights. Sora Wade said it would have been a pity to miss the first Fespaco of the third millennium, concluding, "After all, the VIPS of this festival are surely the film-makers?"
