Recently, local filmmaker and CCA Cinematheque Director Jason Silverman and friends were awarded a grant from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Fund for a documentary about the life and work of the Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene. Silverman and I chatted via email about his film and the impact that the award will have on his production.
Gregoryp™: What about this particular subject, filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene, that intrigued you enough to make an entire film about him?
Jason Silverman: One, Ousmane Sembene is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever studied (he died last year and I never met him). He was a completely self-taught man, having been kicked out of school in the sixth grade. He fought in World War II, became a dockworker in France and then a leading activist and labor leader, taught himself to write, published three successful novels in France and then, on the day that Senegal declared its independence from France, returned home, hoping to tell stories that would galvanize and liberate Africa. And that’s what he did, for the next 40 years. Doing that meant taking a radical, daring leap. Knowing that his intended audience was largely illiterate, Sembene decided to become a filmmaker. The first African filmmaker. That’s ballsy.
He trained in Moscow and in 1962 brought home the first African-owned movie camera. He used it to direct several award-winning shorts and then, in 1966, the first African feature, which won a major award in France. And his subsequent career was incredible: doing battle with the post-colonial and African powers-that-were, raising his own money, making truly magnificent works, no matter what it took. Just in terms of his creation, he’s one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years, and he worked with a level of dedication and political commitment that is unmatched, as far as I can tell, in contemporary culture-making. So his personal story is mind-boggling, worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. I couldn’t pass up trying to tell it …
Two, Sembene’s biographer, Samba Gadjigo, is himself a great man, and I was eager to work with him. We had together programmed the CCA’s African Effect festival for three years. He knew about my film production background (I produced two feature films in the 1990s) and asked to help him do something with the 30 hours of footage he had shot of Sembene. We decided on the spot — this was about 10 months ago — to make a film together. The opportunity to work with him was one I had to seize.
Three, I believe that our commodity culture is an extraordinarily corrosive force. We are shopping ourselves to death. I believe the engine behind this culture is modern storytelling, created by the profit-driven corporate-owned media machinery. I mean, the WTC is bombed, and these people who have the megaphone are telling us to shop. That flies in the face of the function of storytelling through the millennia.
Fortunately, we do have a vibrant alternative media, a media that asks us to think, to connect with reality, to be bigger than our consumer profile. Promoting and creating this kind of media is as important work as anything we can do in this culture. It’s something I’ve tried to do throughout my career, with the Taos Talking Picture Festival, with CCA and with my writing and consulting work (though I’ll admit to my sell-out moments).
Sembene was to my mind the very greatest member of this (unaffiliated) resistance movement. He was the greatest independent filmmaker and the greatest media activist who ever lived. He saw that the images and stories Africans were seeing and hearing and reading were literally killing their culture, and so he dedicated his every ounce of strength — and he was an incredibly strong man — over the course of a remarkable period of time to creating a new storytelling mode for Africans, one that was forward-looking yet respectful of tradition, deep yet funny, steeped in the real but not afraid to venture into the dreamlike and surreal. Africa’s still swamped with the same sort of mind-numbing media as the rest of the world, but Sembene, at least, showed that alternatives are possible.
This film’s intent is to connect an emerging generation of engaged African and African Diaspora youth with the gospel of Sembene. New Mexico’s not our target audience, but if we do our job well, I think his story will be of interest to just about anyone who thinks about the power of storytelling and the necessities of cultural preservation.
gregoryp™: How many other people are involved in your film?
Jason Silverman: We’ve got a small crew — the director, Samba Gadjigo, our associate producer and director of photography, Filip Celander and our business manager, Lacey Adams. A wonderful Senegalese novelist and screenwriter, Boubacar Boris Diop, is helping us with the writing. We are getting lots of help from Anna Celander and Javier Hernandez, and a great filmmaker Ed Radtke has also been really valuable to us, along with the local non-profit Little Globe. Probably most importantly, we’ve got a large and quickly growing family of consultants, advisors, helpers, donors, supporters, which is what it really takes to get a film like this done.
gregoryp(tm): What is the impact of the grant likely to be on your film?
Jason Silverman: The grant encourages us to work all the harder. It brings us into the Sundance family, where we are connected with other filmmakers and funders. And it’s a sign that there are people outside of our circle that are eager to see this film. It’s a major boost for us.
gregoryp™: Your official title locally is Cinematheque Director at the Center for Contemporary Arts. How do you possibly have time to make movies too?
Jason Silverman: Living in Santa Fe hones one’s skills at career multitasking. I deeply believe in this project and I’m finding that this level of commitment feeds and informs my curating and writing work, too.
gregoryp™: You visited Senegal to do this movie. How long were you there and what were the logistics like?
Jason Silverman: We went with a small crew for 12 days, and it was amazing. We hopped off the plane in Dakar and went to work, starting on an ambitious list of interviews. We went to Sembene’s birthplace, in the south of Senegal, and then built a screening — using a portable projector, screen, DVD player and a generator — of Sembene’s final film, Moolaade, in a Bambara village. It was my first trip to Africa, but our director, Samba Gadjigo, is something of a superstar there, and he made it all go remarkably smoothly. He even (almost) convinced us that pigeon, when appropriately barbecued, is a delicacy.
– A collaboration between Jason Silverman & Gregory Pleshaw
