When this year's jury for the Cannes Film Festival met the press last month, an African journalist bluntly stated his anger about the content and emphasis of the festival. 'Why have there been no films from African countries for the past few years?'
Well, he wasn't totally correct. At this year's festival, Algerian director Mehdi Charef's Cartouches Gauloises was an out-of-competition entry. Last year, there was Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako. And the year before that, there was the Egyptian film The Gate of the Sun, directed by Yousry Nasrallah. But the fact that there are so few African movies at Cannes - and you really have to trawl the archives to find them - suggested that he had a good point. Has Cannes turned its back on the continent?
The answer this year was a resounding 'no'.
Although African filmmakers were largely absent this year, the continent probably got more attention than at any time since 1975, when Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina's ode to the Algerian struggle for independence, won the top prize.
The reason for all the attention this year was due to one issue: Darfur. The humanitarian crisis in western Sudan prompted a flurry of activity and was featured in several films - albeit none made by Africans.
Leading the way in awareness-raising was George Clooney. Early last year, he travelled to Darfur and made a documentary with his journalist father, Nick. The pair - together with fellow Ocean's Thirteen stars Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle and producer Jerry Weintraub - established a Darfur aid foundation called Not on Our Watch. At Cannes this year, they held two charity events that raised more than US$9 million. Clooney also contributed the voiceover for Sand and Sorrow, Paul Freedman's documentary about the bloody conflict which screened at the festival's film market. And there's more to come: seen at the market were the producers of Beyond the Sun, a US$15 million Darfur documentary due to be shot in South Africa early next year with Mennan Yapo as director.
Adding to the political element at the festival was Screamers, the latest work from US documentary-maker Carla Garapedian. It explores the subject of genocide and traces the appalling history of a number of minority groups who have been slaughtered by tyrannical regimes during the past century.
