Jean-Pierre Bekolo

• A Cameroonian auteur-director and producer, born in Yaoundé in 1966.
  
  After studying physics in Yaoundé, Bekolo studied in the 1980s at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris, as well as semiotics with Christian Metz. Discovered at the Cannes Film Festival at 25 years of age, with the original Quartier Mozart (1992), he took renowned festivals by storm (Berlinale, Fespaco, or Sundance, for which Aristotle’s Plot, 1995, was the first African film to be selected). To update views on contemporary Africa, this “active pessimist” paved his way between dystopia and utopia, blurring the border between reality and fiction, and hybridising genres (documentary and mockumentary, science fiction, thriller, etc.). His stylised and sardonic socio-political films, excavating a little-known past (Germanic colonial history in the series Our Wishes, 2020), investigating today’s invisibilised groups (the Afro-Colombian community of Nous les noirs, 2021), or seeking tomorrow’s alternatives (from Les Saignantes, 2005, a pioneering film of African sci-fi, to the Afrofuturist film essay Naked Reality, 2016). Bekolo is also a teacher and author: he maintains a blog; published Africa for the future: sortir un nouveau monde du cinéma in 2009; and created the programme Scripto Sensa in 2021, dedicated to the film adaptation of African literary works.

• Quartier Mozart (1992) - Le Complot d'Aristote (1996) - La Grammaire de grand-mère (1996) - The Bloodettes (2005) - Imagine Afrika (2007) - Le Président (2013) - Les Choses et les Mots de Mudimbe (2015) - Naked Reality (2016) - Afrique, la Pensée en Mouvement (2017) - Miraculous Weapons (2017) - Our Wishes (2020) - Us, The Blacks (2020)