The Return of an Adventurer
The Return of an Adventurer
Afrique sur Seine by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadour Sarr
1955 | France | 21 min
& Samba le Grand and The Return of an Adventurer by Moustapha Alassane
1977 & 1966 | Niger | 14 & 34 min
While the pre-independence Afrique sur Seine explores the lives of Africans living in Paris, Samba le grand's colorful stop-motion puppets relate an African folktale about a would-be conqueror who meets his match in a female potentate.
The Return of an Adventurer is the story of a man coming back to his home village from America bearing gifts of cowboy outfits for his friends. A mock-ruthless Western movie ensues, scorning contemporary values and consumerism and poking fun at the filmmaker’s own postcolonial peers.
This event will be introduced by Aboubakar Sanogo. Sanogo teaches film studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he is cross-appointed with the Institute of African Studies (IAS), the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) and the Curatorial Studies Program. He is currently Graduate Supervisor of the Film Studies Program at Carleton. Besides teaching, Professor Sanogo’s work involves research, film curation, policy making, and institution building. His research interests include African and Afro-diasporic cinemas, documentary film theory, history and form, transnational and world cinemas, film preservation and restoration, colonial cinema, early and silent cinema, and film festival studies. He is currently working on completing two manuscripts, The History of Documentary in Africa and The Indocile Image: The Cinema of Med Hondo. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Africa cinema, documentary film theory, history and aesthetics, cinema and human rights, the cinemas of Billy Wilder and Steven Soderbergh, the history of world cinema, and film festivals and world cinema. He also organized and taught a study-abroad course entitled African Cinema on Location, held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He is the founder of Carleton University’s World Cinema Forum and of the annual African Film Festival of Ottawa (AFFO). He is also the North American Regional Secretary for the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), Africa’s most important filmmakers’ organization. In this capacity, Aboubakar Sanogo is currently working on the African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a partnership between FEPACI, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which seeks to preserve and restore fifty African films of historical, cultural and artistic significance.
This event is presented as part of the film series 'African Legacy: Francophone Films 1955 to 2019'.
