Sarah Jilani

It was seen kind of...

It was a propaganda tool.

So France, for example, had introduced a cinema in Senegal quite early, well before Senegalese independence.

And they did like to flood the markets with Bollywood films and Hollywood films.

It entertained so-called colonial subjects, but it also did not really relate to their own conditions.

So it was a very safe option for French colonial officers in Senegal.

And Sembène actually recounts growing up watching these kinds of films.

He says he loved Westerns in particular.

But then he went on to make very different kind of films.

Oh, no, I don't think so.

I mean, Hollywood does have a global penetration.

But, you know, I recall the Korean director of the popular film Parasite recently quipped, oh, the Oscars, that's a provincial awards show.

And I laughed at that because it does actually reflect how large the audiences are in Asia.

Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia.

Hollywood is a nice to have for a lot of these directors, but ultimately the numbers of audiences you can attract on home soil doesn't really compare.

There's a political aspect to their interest and focus on their own audiences as well, though.

Film in many parts of Africa and Asia was also part of the project of decolonization.

So

they turn to film to reclaim self-representation.

This is nothing short of, in a way, reinventing how they're going to see themselves, how they're going to see the role of their new sovereign nation in a post-colonial world.