Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Science fiction, playful tale, thriller, fake (and true!) Documentaries, the work of the Cameroonian avant-garde filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo whose imaginative work overturns stereotypes of Africa and African cinema operates on multiple layers, engaging viewers with thrilling stories, biting humour and dramatic aesthetics

He already garnered attention at the Cannes Film Festival with his debut film Quartier Mozart  made at the age of 25, with a style that is playful, comic, and sardonic became the representative of a new generation that has been working against the restrictive expectations of African cinema, mixing genres and linking pop with politics. Quartier Mozart won number of awards (Locarno, Montreal... and was nominated for the Surtherland Trophy in London along with Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.)

An advocate of artistic freedom, Bekolo is committed to realising Africa’s philosophies and cultures. Quartier Mozart shows the hybridity, complexity and humour in urban Yaounde in a playful, hip-hop reinvention of a traditional tale about gender, power, magic and politics.

The works of this unclassifiable filmmaker make cinema and make future, totally refusing the categorisation, whether thematic, formal or ideological. They think of the future in the present in order to analyse and (re) question the dominant narratives born of the political and economic violence of our societies. Techno-scientific imaginations and speculative gestures, deployed for the purposes of criticism and as a force of proposition, are at the heart of the director's work.

Faced with the mutations that the planet and the African worlds are going through, particularly at the beginning of the third millennium, using imagination and speculation to make change seems more relevant than ever, even urgent, and allows us to lay the foundations for change. a re-writing of the very concept of utopia.

Fiction / action / miraculous weapon, the cinema or, better, the act of making cinema of Bekolo, becomes here an "Afropocene" mode of operation.

After Quartier Mozart, he directed Aristotle's Plot , the African entry in the British Film Institute's 100 Years of Cinema Series of films commemorating the centenary of cinema that has included the participation of prestigious filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Stephen Frears, George Miller, Edgar Reitz, and Jean-Luc Godard. Part action movie send-up, part parody of Aristotle's rules, part satire on Africa's preoccupation with itself, this first African film selected at Sundance shows Bekolo to be an "increasingly fearless trickster."

His avant-garde vampire sci-fi lesbian horror Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes) selected by the MOMA in New-York in 2017 among the 70 science-fiction classics. It premiered at the Toronto film festival, was nominated in two categories at the French Césars (2009); it is considered to be the first African sci-fi movie. Les Saignantes won the Silver Stallion & Best Actress Awards at Fespaco (Pan African Film Festival Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) in 2007.

This dystopian bold stylistic uniqueness and audacious political message is a wild ride. At the same time sci-fi comic thriller with stunning surreal visuals, presents extreme corruption, feminism, social decay and intergenerational conflict for review.

Naked Reality (2016) is his second science-fiction film. He persistently pushes the limits of representation (“I know I crossed boundaries,” says the main character of Naked Reality, confirming the director’s own quest) as he searches for new ways to tell a story. Shot in black and white, this hour-long experiment follows a vague plot.This is an “afrofuturistic/sci-fi” film taking place 150 years in the future when the human race is plagued by a terrible virus – “bad luck.” Among the director’s memorable lines on the topic, consider the following: “We shouldn’t just be making movies, we should be changing reality.”

Banned in Cameroon in 2013, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's controversial film Le President Aiming to incite viewers to conceive an alternate reality, his  fake documentary The President is a hilarious, biting satire on African leaders who cling to power.

Les Mots et les Choses de Mudimbe  on the renowned Congolese philosopher, multi-linguist and uber-polymath. This 4 hours documentary was part of the official selection of the 2015 Berlinale. "An unusual film, as fascinating as its object/subject, opulent, sensitive, clever, and radical. Another station of delightful postcolonial, cosmopolitan filmmaking".

Our Wishes 28 episodes TV Drama series; an African perspective on the first encounter between Cameroonian chiefs and the Germans around the signature of the treaty that will make Cameroon a German colony just before the Berlin conference of 1884.

Afrique, la Pensée en Mouvement Part I and Part II presented at Berlinale 2018 two part documentary on Les Ateliers de Dakar created in 2016 by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr about the most important intellectuals on the continent annual gathering to rethink Africa.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo studied physics at the University of Yaounde, then film editing at INA in Paris where he discovered semiotics he studied under Christian Metz.

In 2018 the Musée du Quai Branly where he had exhibited An African in Space in 2006 devotes a retrospective.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo is a founding member of the World Cinema Alliance e.V. (with Visconti's assistant, Francesco Maseli). In 2015, he is part of the prestigious residency program in Berlin DAAD and receives the Prince Claus Award. At Fespaco 2019 his latest film Miraculous Weapons receives the Ousmane Sembene Award.

In 2019, Bekolo won the Ecobank Foundation’s Sembene Ousmane prize for this film.

The filmmaker continues his research and his work. In 2016, he directed Naked Reality, an experimental afro-futuristic film and then in 2017, he directed the documentary Africa, thought in motion pt. I and II, which explores schools of thought in Dakar, and Miraculous Weapons, a story of human freedom and the freedom of expression.  A tribute to Jean-Pierre Bekolo was held at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris from October 13 to 14 in 2018.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo has been a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo is an author of a book Africa For The Future, 2009 Dagan

He is the inventor of the concept of The Therapeutic Intellectual.

You can watch his work on this platform: https://jeanpierrebekolo.com

• Studied physics at University of Yaounde
• Institut national de l'audiovisuel INA in France, under Christian Metz.

• 1992 Cannes Film Festival Prix Afrique en Creation for Quartier Mozart
• 1992-Swissair/Crossair Special Prize and Golden Leopard Nominee at the Locarno International Film Festival for Quartier Mozart[1].
• 1992-, Montreal First film prize-Special mention at the Montreal world Film Festival for Quartier Mozart[1]
• 1993 - Sutherland Throphey Nomination for London Film Festival for Quartier Mozart.
• 1997 - Le Complot d'Aristotle (Aristotle's Plot) featured at Sundance Film Festival.
• 2005 - Les Saignantes premiered at Toronto International Film Festival.
• 2005 - Holden Award for Best Script-special mention at Torino Film Festival for Les Saignantes
• 2006 - An African Woman in Space presented for the opening of Musée du Quai Branly
• 2007- Silver Etalon de Yennega at Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival for Les Saignantes
• 2009 - Published his book African For The Future Paris 2009 Dagan
• 2015 - Les Mots et les Choses de Mudimbe is premiering at Berlinale
• 2017 - Miraculous Weapons opens at JCC, Journées Cinematographiques de Carthage
• 2017 - Les Saignantes was selected by the MOMA in New-York among the 70 Classics of Science-Fiction
• 2017 - Our Wishes colonial TV series is presented at Leopold Museum in Vienna
• 2018 - Afrique, La Pensée en Mouvement PartI presented at Berlinale
• 2018 - A Retrospective of Jean-Pierre Bekolo is organised at Musée du Quai Branly in Paris
• 2019 - Ecobank Foundation Ousmane Sembene prize for Miraculous Weapons at Fespaco in Ouagadougou
• 2019 - A Jean-Pierre Bekolo Retrospective is organised at the DFF in Frankfurt Deutsche Filminstitute Filmmuseum

He had taught filmmaking at the following places:

• Virginia Tech, 1998
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001
• Duke University, 2003

• Quartier Mozart 80 min. 1992
• Le Complot d'Aristotle (Aristotle's Plot) 71 min. 1996
• La Grammaire de Grand'mère 8 min. 1996
• Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes) 93 min. 2005
• Le Président (The President) 65 min. 2013
• Les Choses et les Mots de Mudimbe 243 min. 2015

• Naked Reality 62 min. 2016
• Afrique, la Pensée en Mouvement Part I et II . 2017
• Miraculous Weapons 99 min. 2018
• Our Wishes TV Series 16x26min. 2017-2020

• Welcome To Applied Fiction, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin/ Germany, February 2016 [2]

• Jean-Pierre Bekolo at IMDb
• The directors blog site
• Official web site for Les Saignantes
• Information about Le Président from the 34th Durban Film Fest
• Information about Bekolo at the Clinton Presidential Library
• Review from the Duke Chronicle
• Review of Les Saignantes (French)
• Review of Les Saignantes (French)
• Waiting for (African) Cinema, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quest, Vlad Dima https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/waiting-for-african-cinema-jeanpierre-bekolos-quest/F8E46666B3B6E0A2CBEAD3AC358BA5B1#.ZD4mSWLmKi4.mailto