ARTISTA INTERNACIONAL INVITADO:

Jean Pierre Bekolo

Cameroonian avant-garde filmmaker and cultural activist, winner of international awards such as the Africa Prize in Creation at Cannes (1992) with his debut feature Quartier Mozart. His second film, Aristotle’s Plot, was commissioned by the British Film Institute for the celebration of 100 years of cinema, alongside directors such as Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci. In 2005 Bekolo released The Bleeders, a futuristic thriller about feminism, corruption and censorship in Cameroon, winner of the Best Actress award at the FESPACO festival in Burkina Faso in 2007. His film Le Président (2013), is an open and tragicomic critique of Paul Biya, the Cameroonian president who has been in power for more than three decades, and who censored the film.

Bekolo is also a writer, video artist and film professor in Cameroon and the United States; founding member of the World Cinema Alliance and Secretary General of the Guild of African Filmmakers. His audiovisual narrative defies film genre labels. His films combine elements of science fiction, mockumentary and political satire to make an aesthetic reflection that subverts conventional narratives and one-dimensional representations of cinema and the complex realities of African nations. Controversial and provocative in his visual proposal and his interventions, Bekolo sees art and cinema as tools for transformation at a social and narrative level, and conceives Africa as a project under construction, as a concept to be reinvented.