Yearbook 2004
Burkina Faso. In January, President Blaise Compaoré dismissed the country’s defense minister, General Kouamé Lougué, and replaced him with a civilian. No explanation for the dismissal was given, but Lougué must have been interviewed in connection with the disclosure of a planned coup attempt in October 2003.
In April, a former army captain was sentenced to ten years in prison for planning the coup against President Compaoré. The captain, Luther Ouali, pleaded guilty and said his main motive was to try to remove the social gaps in the country. Of the other accused, six were sentenced to shorter prison sentences. Another six people, including Norbert Tiendrebeogo, leader of the opposition party Social Forces Front (FFS), were acquitted.
The total population in Burkina Faso is 20,903,284 people in 2020. Ouali said in court that he had received financial support from a close associate of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo to conduct the coup d’état. Gbagbo denied all involvement in the coup attempt and instead accused Burkina Faso of supporting the Ivorian rebels who tried to overthrow him.
In July, the Burkese government accused the Ivory Coast of violating the country’s airspace on several occasions during the year. The government threatened to shoot down aircraft if the violations continued. The Ivorian government denied that military planes would have been in Burkina territory. The rebel movement in Ivory Coast, which has no planes of its own, said they did not know of any flights over the neighboring country.
Relations between the two countries have been strained since the Ivory Coast civil war broke out in the fall of 2002. After the peace agreement in 2003, fighting broke out again in 2004, which meant a continuing difficult situation for the many Burkinians who live and work in the southern Ivory Coast.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The cinematography of the former Upper Volta, limited to a few titles until the early 1980s, experienced rapid growth, both quantitatively and qualitatively, starting in 1983, when Th. Sankara came to power. Taking an anti-Western stance, the revolutionary president set as primary objectives the agricultural self-sufficiency of the country, education and medical assistance for the peasant population (which still represented 90% of the population) and the promotion of the status of women. At the same time, Sankara launched a strong moralizing campaign, entrusting the revolutionary committees with the power to try politicians and bureaucrats for corruption and changing the name of the state to BF, or “homeland of upright and respectable men”. FESPACO); born in 1969, in the short period of his presidency (Sankara was assassinated on October 15, 1987) it became an indispensable appointment of knowledge and reflection, as well as a great popular festival, transforming Ouagadougou into the capital of African cinema and all audiovisual production, thanks also to the presence, within the biennial festival, of the Marché international du cinéma et de la télévision africains (MICA). feature films Le sang des parias (1971) by Mamadou Djim Kola and Sur le chemin de la reconciliation (1976) by René-Bernard Yonli. In the same year, the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (FEPACI) was founded to support the production and dissemination of African cinema on its continent. Fundamental and ambitious role, which would have found it difficult to materialize. In February 1991, FEPACI founded “Écrans d’Afrique”, a Pan-African magazine of cinema, television and video which, for almost ten years, acted as information and criticism about cinematographies, authors and films of the continent. But in the seventies other institutions were also born, which often would have disappointed expectations, such as the Consortium entifricain de distribution cinématographique (CIDC, 1972), the Center internofricain de production de films (CIPROFILMS, 1974), the CINAFRIC factories that made it possible to make films in the boom years, the Institut africain d’éducation cinématographique (INAFEC, 1976-1987) and, subsequently, the Cinémathèque africaine (1995), which was difficult to operate. great value of the Eighties was Wend kuuni (1982, The Gift of God), Gaston Kaboré’s debut feature, a fundamental figure in the cinema of the BF of the last twenty years. With extreme narrative simplicity, the director tells the story of a child who has lost his speech following the death of his mother and who is raised by an adoptive family. This style also recurs in his other works, the fables Rabi (1992) and Buud-Yam (1997), and the politician Zan Boko (1988, Terra senza voce). Other films from that period include Pawéogo (1982, L ‘ emigrante) by Daniel Kollo Sanou, a comedy starring a farmer who wants to leave his land to go to the Ivory Coast; Jours de tourmente (1983) by Paul Zoumbara, a story still in a rural setting, in which the generational differences on working methods in the fields are observed; Desebagato (1987, The Last Salary) by Emmanuel Kalifa Sanon and L’histoire d’Orokia (1987) by Jacob Sou and Jacques Oppenheim, which address, respectively, the theme of exploitation in factories and that of the laws that impose forced marriages. In the Eighties, Idrissa Ouedraogo, the champion of cinema from the BF and sub-Saharan Africa, also appeared. Great storyteller and at the same time passionate and theorist of experimentation, the filmmaker has dealt with the aspects of everyday life, culture and memory, making them resurface from strong and classic genres such as comedy, melodrama, the western. Films of the caliber of Yaaba (1989, Nonna), Tilai (1990, Legge), Kini & Adams (1997) have confirmed the continuous search for expression of the Burkinabé author. Other directors have drawn additional aspects of Burkina Faso cinema. The panorama of the nineties was enriched by the works of S. Pierre Yameogo, Fanta Regina Nacro, Drissa Touré, Dani Kouyaté. Education, life in the city, corruption are topics described by Yameogo in Laafi (1991, All right), Wendemu, l’enfant du bon Dieu (1993), Silmandé (1998, Storm, known as Tourbillon). Nacro uses comedy for educational purposes to talk about relationships and sex in Un certain matin (1992), Puk nini (1995, Open your eyes) and Le truc de Konaté (1998). At the center of Touré’s film Haramuya (1995, The Proscription) is the capital Ouagadougou, where Kouyaté sets the television series about high school youth, À nous la vie (1998), after having told with Keïta, l’héritage du griot (1995) the complicity that is established between a child and a storyteller. Children and adolescents, the central element of many films, also find space in the works of Moustapha Dao, À nous la rue (1986), Le neveu du peintre (1989) and L’enfant et le caïman (1991), as in Souko, le cinématographe en carton (1998) by Issiaka Konaté.