We have the special honor of spotlighting a body of work by the visionary filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, whose career spans over three decades of transformative cinema. From the groundbreaking Quartier Mozart (1992) to the recent Mudimbe’s Order of Things (Part I & Part II), Bekolo has continually pushed the boundaries of storytelling, offering films that are at once rooted in local traditions and soaring with universal, visionary themes.
Still from Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes)
Bekolo’s films invite us into a cinematic realm where magic, science, and reality converge to challenge our perceptions and ignite our imaginations. His mastery of photogénie—the unique ability of cinema to reveal hidden dimensions of reality—elevates his work into the realm of the extraordinary. Films like Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes) and Naked Reality fuse sensuality, politics, and speculative science fiction, presenting bold critiques of power structures while envisioning transformative futures steeped in African cosmology.
Across a career spanning more than 30 years, Bekolo has used his craft as an alchemist of cinema, blending intellect and imagination to create works that serve as both entertainment and intellectual provocation. With Grandma’s Grammar and Quartier Mozart, he infuses magical realism into everyday narratives, reflecting the interplay between tradition and innovation. In We Black People (Nous les Noirs) and Foumban is Wakanda, Bekolo engages deeply with identity and activism, reclaiming cinematic space to redefine Blackness and African storytelling.
Still from We Black People (Nous les Noirs)
The Science New Wave finds a kindred spirit in Bekolo’s boundary-defying films. His exploration of the intersection between folklore, science, and philosophy resonates with the movement’s commitment to hybrid storytelling forms. Bekolo’s cinema transforms—revealing hidden truths, bridging past and future, and challenging audiences to envision new realities.
About Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Jean-Pierre Bekolo was born in Yaounde, Cameroon in 1966 and is now known to subvert the conventions and didacticism of African film and literature with an aesthetic that “tosses it all merrily together”. He has taught film at Virginia Tech, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Duke University. In the late 80’s Bekolo trained as a television film editor in France at INA. He returned home shortly thereafter and worked for Cameroonian television, where he was responsible for editing short films. During this time, he was also involved in the production of films, such as Boyo, Un Pauvre Blanc, and Mohawk People, as well as video clips for Les Têtes Brûlées and Manu Dibango. His first feature film was the award-winning Quartier Mozart (1992), which won prizes at film festivals in Cannes, Locarno, and Montreal and was nominated, in 1993, for a British Film Institute award. The film mixes sorcery and urban realities in a satire of male and female roles. Aristotle’s Plot was the African entry in the British Film Institute’s series of films commemorating the centenary of cinema. Part meditation on the trials of African filmmaking, part action movie, and parody of Aristotelian and African preoccupations, it shows his skill as an “increasingly fearless trickster”. Other feature-length films include Have You Seen Franklin Roosevelt? (1994) and Les Saignantes (2005). Miraculous Weapons, his 2017 drama, was nominated for the Tanit d'Or at Carthage Film Festival.
