Seventy Years After, “Afrique sur Seine” Still Rings A Bell in African Cinema

The current state of African cinema is a consequence of many years of sweat and blood. Pioneers of what is today a booming, dynamic industry never had it easy in their times, particularly in the 20th century when the continent was largely subjected to infamous policies under colonial rule and post-colonial military dictatorships. In 1934, the French government passed the Laval Decree to prevent cinema from propagating inflammatory, anti-colonial ideals. As a result, Africans from Francophone countries were barred from directing films in their own countries. The Black African filmmakers, the Benin-born Senegalese Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr, Robert Caristan, and Jacques Mélo Kane, had to turn to Paris, where they filmed Afrique sur Seine in 1955.

Seventy years since its release, Afrique sur Seine continues to maintain its position as a groundbreaking effort in African film and the first Francophone African film. The film follows the life of a group of Paris-based African students, covering their experiences and the nostalgia arising from being away from their homeland.

The film caters to themes of identity and displacement, mirroring the plights and mental state of Africans during the period of colonialism. From a formal perspective, the film creates a connection between the 1940s Italian Neorealism (also Golden Age of Italian Cinema)—an era of filmmaking that captured the harsh economic and moral realities of post-World War II Italy—and the 1950s French Nouvelle Vague (also known as French New Wave), an artistic and intellectual movement that shirked traditional filmmaking conventions and embraced a highly experimental style with attention to novel editing, narrative, and visual methods.

Challenging erroneous historical European interpretation of the African experience, Afrique sur Seine creates images of Black culture that are not only positive but also honest. By doing so, the film attempts to rewrite negative Western stereotypes in colonial history that portrayed Africans as primitive, barbaric people in need of civilization.

Afrique sur Seine‘s seventieth anniversary coincides with the posthumous centennial celebration of its co-producer, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987). Vieyra also founded the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes (translated as “The Pan African Federation of Filmmakers”), a continental voice of filmmakers from various regions across Africa and the Diaspora. Initially aspiring to become a biologist, he ventured into filmmaking in the 1950s and emerged as the first Black African graduate of the elite L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (also known as “the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies”) film school in Paris. Together with his friends, a year after the release of Afrique sur Seine, he made Un Homme, Un Ideal, Une Vie, telling the story of a Senegalese fisherman who, in his unique way, attempts to blend traditional customs with modern technologies.