The project nurturing West Africa's new generation of women filmmakers

Some of the West African film industry's biggest names are backing a new mentorship programme to support emerging women filmmakers. Showcased at this year's Cannes Film Festival, the Mariama Lab project aims to help women bring their stories to a wider audience in the region and beyond.

Born in Côte d’Ivoire, Azata Soro made her name as an actress in Burkina Faso and has since become a director and producer. She learned on the job, but always dreamed of going to film school for professional training.

"I talk all the time about imposter syndrome, and it lasted for so long. I still carry it with me. My advice to young women today would be: 'Free yourself from it and shine,'" Soro tells RFI.

Today, she is helping other young women as one of the coordinators for Mariama Lab, a year-long mentoring programme to support emerging women filmmakers from West Africa.

Co-created by the Collectif 50/50, a French NGO for gender equality, and the Mariama Institut, a film writing residency in Mauritania, it is designed to boost women working on their first or second features.

The five women chosen to participate in the first edition, which runs until December, hail from Gambia, Senegal, Guinea Conakry and Mauritania.

Escaping the male gaze

For Soro, cinema represents first and foremost a way for women to take control of their stories.

"The first film I remember seeing on television was about excision [female genital mutilation] – I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I remember my father getting very angry about it. Our grandmother wanted that for us and he didn’t," she recalls.

"Creating an African women’s cinema means telling our stories through our eyes without the male gaze focused on our bodies."

As an actress, Soro suffered a violent attack on a set that left her physically and emotionally scarred.

"For a long time I was stuck at home, I didn't dare speak up, I didn't dare share my story. There was this fear," she says.

Soro later realised that cinema could become a powerful platform to expose stories like hers. Together with other women in film, in 2019 she helped launch the African #MeToo movement, #MemePasPeur (Not Afraid). "It’s thanks to cinema that I have been able to speak out about the violence I suffered in the industry," she says.

Helping women too afraid come forward and opening the way for them to make a career in film became her new drive.

‘Forgiveness has to be lived out’: Rwanda's Cannes winner Dusabejambo

Breaking barriers, building bridges

Now settled in France, Soro has found support from groups like Collectif 50/50, which are raising awareness about issues such as sexual violence, discrimination and gender equality in the cinema industry at large.

Through the Mariama Institute, she also hopes to set up training programmes for intimacy coordinators for African film sets, something less standard on the continent than in some Western countries.

Soro is one of several well-known names in the African film industry involved with the Mariama Lab project. Others include screenwriter Kessen Tall, who worked on the award-winning 2014 film Timbuktu with Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako.

Senegalese director and producer Angèle Diabang, who was part of the Un Certain Regard Jury this year in Cannes, will provide advice to Mariama Lab participants, as will France-based actress and director Aïssa Maïga, who has Senegalese and Malian roots.

Run with the support of the French embassy in Guinea Conakry and the Institut Français cultural network, the programme has four main stages: one-on-one online mentoring, face-to-face masterclasses with industry professionals, a writing workshop in Guinea and participation in a film festival.

For now, Mariama Lab is focused on West Africa, but the ambition is ultimately to open it up to the entire continent.

"There’s a problem of breaking down the barriers within the African film market itself – there aren’t many bridges between countries within the cinema industry," explains Mathy Mendy, a coordinator on the programme for Collectif 50/50.

"Whether we have candidates from countries that speak French, English or Portuguese, it doesn't matter, the main thing is to bring together the synergies of female filmmakers and artists across Africa more broadly."

Afronova: promoting African cinema at Cannes

From script to screen

The mentoring programme is starting by focusing on women directors, Mendy says, but in the long term they want to target every role in the production chain, from screenwriters to camera operators to editors.

"Collectif 50/50 observed that when women are behind the camera, they generally have a more gender balanced team," she notes.

Both Soro and Mathy agree that Africa has a dynamic film industry, but lacks the cinemas to show its work widely. Without broad distribution, African films often struggle to travel across the continent.

"Africans want to tell their own stories – especially women," Soro says. "There is a large audience that wants to see African content and this includes the diaspora."

She points to box office success stories like Diabang’s So Long a Letter, an adaptation of Mariama Ba’s novel that became a breakout hit in Senegal, and Marabout Chérie by Côte d’Ivoire’s Kadhy Touré, which drew thousands of filmgoers in West Africa before securing wider international distribution.

As for the participants in Mariama Lab, Mendy’s advice is "to listen to themselves, to trust themselves, to move forward".

"There will surely be obstacles, setbacks, but [they should] continue on this path because it's where they belong. Soon people will be talking about them, they're already talking about them, and before long they will be indispensable in the international film industry."