Out of Africa

Although it's known as "the Cannes of Africa", to most visitors the only thing that the FESPACO, the pan-African film festival held every two years in Burkina Faso, has in common with its Riviera counterpart is the fact that the main language at both events is French. Although the FESPACO, first held in 1969, has made Ouagadougou the capital of African cinema, it's an almost incongruous place to host an international film festival: Burkina is, after all, one of the poorest countries in the world. With cinema and press people fresh off planes from Europe and the US, tempers quickly frayed at the rather relaxed organisational style - old Africa hands in the press centre smiling shyly at the exasperation of less experienced colleagues.

The festival opened with a Saturday night concert at Ouagadougou's main stadium, packed to capacity - with hundreds more people locked outside. Many locals arrived early in the day and, wearied by the intense heat, they were a little restless by the time the ceremony began. Unwise photographers who ventured out from the protected press area to take pictures of the crowd were immediately pelted with orange skins and plastic bags of water, 40,000 people roaring their approval at every direct hit.

Several local music stars soon provided distraction, however, the crowd going wild at the highly suggestive hip movements of the lithe young dancers. By the time the main attraction, Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour, arrived on stage, the stadium was a cauldron of noise and light. Hundreds of people had lit torches made of newspaper, oddly disembodied in the pitch-black African night. N'Dour, appealing to a highly partisan audience, transformed one of his songs into a hymn to Burkina, waves of roared approval accompanying every refrain and spotlights washing over the packed, swaying stands.

Local enthusiasm was equally evident among the audience for the opening film, carefully calculated to stoke the festival atmosphere. Les couilles de l'elephant (The Elephant's Balls) is a funny and provocative film from Gabon, mixing, as the film's publicists have been telling everyone, "elections and erections". The audience reaction to the movie - and to the youth-oriented Zimbabwean hit Yellow Card - belies the assumption that African cinema and commercial success don't mix. Its tale of a powerful man brought low by impotence recalls, in more broadly comic terms, one of the classics of African cinema, Sembene Ousmane's 1974 Xala.

Ousmane, the grandfather of African cinema, was back at the FESPACO with an out-of-competition entry this year: he received a warmer welcome than most directors in line for the top prizes. Faat Kine doesn't reach the heights of his earlier work but there is still plenty of incisive wit in this paean to female virtues; the conclusion, though, is disappointingly conventional after the trenchant commentary on contemporary Senegal that comes before.

The influence of Ousmane's Xala is also palpable in the closing scenes of Battu, from Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko, the early favourite to take the grand prize, "the Stallion of Yennenga". Sissoko took the grand prize home in 1995 with Gimba, and directed one of the most striking films in the 1999 competition, the luminously beautiful La Genese (affectionately remembered for its comical mass (male) circumcision scene).

Battu, shot in Senegal, returns to the politico-social territory mined so successfully in Sissoko's first films, Nyamonton and Finzan, with the tale of a "beggar's war" provoked by the efforts of an ambitious politician to expel beggars from the city. The film, unsurprisingly, is superbly shot, with frighteningly authentic scenes of police brutality against the beggar population. Although it loses its way at times in trying to cover too many plot strands and has a distracting mix of actors (including Danny Glover), at its best it bears comparison with the work of Mali's most accomplished director, Souleymane Cisse, whose angry, socially engaged films of the 1970s and 1980s sent African cinema in an entirely new and energetic direction.

There are a total of 20 films in competition this year, with an especially strong selection from North African countries; the chairman of the jury is the Tunisian director Ferid Boughedir, best known for his evocative, sensual coming-of-age tale, Halfaouine. Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch takes up the coming-of-age theme in his polished second feature, Ali Zaoua. Focusing on a trio of homeless children determined to give their friend a decent burial, it generally steers clear of sentimentality in its harsh depiction of life on the streets of Rabat, recalling the clear-eyed view of beggar children in the Indian film Salaam Bombay. Ayouch displays particular skill in his direction of the three child actors at the heart of the film, who are natural and credible as they veer constantly between solidarity and betrayal in their efforts to survive.

The biggest audiences so far have been for new films from Burkina. Despite hosting the FESPACO for over 30 years, Ouagadougou cinemas rarely screen African films outside of the festival period, and local fans have turned out in force to see Sia, The Python's Dream and Siraba. Even the 8 a.m. showings of both films played to packed houses - with the coffee stalls outside the cinema doing a brisk trade in Nescafe to the bleary-eyed media.

Both films mark a step away from the almost anthropological cinema so common in Burkina and Mali in the past, with strong narrative drive replacing the attention previously devoted to documenting the routines of daily life. Sia focuses on the intended sacrifice of a young woman in a village whose inhabitants believe that the python-god needs intermittent appeasement. However, on this occasion the sacrifice does not go as planned and the truth behind the python-god emerges. The film lacks the visual power of the best Burkina cinema, but the story is told with real verve, making, not incidentally, some acute points about the use and abuse of power in traditional society. There's an almost Shakespearean logic to the manner in which events spiral out of control, as well as in the presence of a half-mad man who comments ironically on the events in the town.

Siraba, also centres on a village with beliefs in a serpent-spirit (although in this case a boa), focuses on the clash between traditional and modern societies. Although less polished than Sia, the film makes a compelling case for the respect for traditional ways: far from the big cities, Africa is alive and well.