Usaku Wammanda: Africans Must Tell Their Own Stories, Shape Global Cinema

Dr. Usaku Wammanda, a lecturer at Film and Multimedia Department, School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, speaks about International Student Film Festival, why Africans should tell their stories among other salient issues. Charles Ajunwa brings excerpts

What’s the Pan-Atlantic University International Student Film Festival all about?

The Pan-Atlantic University International Student Film Festival is about celebrating next African storytellers. This year, we focused on African students’ films. We’re taking submissions from all student filmmakers and then the major idea is to create a platform to celebrate these young filmmakers and also within this platform create an avenue for collaboration with industry experts and then opportunities for funders and all that. So we invite industry people to give sessions and then students interact with these industry people. In fact, our hope is that sometimes they watch these students’ films and then they pick interest in what the students are doing. This is the third edition. Last year’s edition, the student that won the Best Film Award, her film went to AFRIF and from AFRIF, she got a filmmaker that was willing to sponsor her next film. So those are the kind of things we’re hoping for at our Student Film Festival.

What is the major objective of the student film festival?

The major objective is to celebrate these young filmmakers. And besides that, discuss the future of African cinema and film schools. We have a panel on that because film studies in Nigeria, there’s now undergraduate department. Since the unbundling by National University Commission (NUC), we have universities now running the Film and Multimedia Studies. So we’re creating a platform for these people to collaborate and have access to industry people.

Do you factor in aspect of our culture, especially indigenous languages that we are fast losing to Western cultures why creating these films?

Yes, we do. We’re looking into it, because like you said, we’re losing our culture and young people are learning about culture from the media, films for example. So why focusing on Africa, we’re saying how do we take African storytelling to the next level with the younger generation? That is why the idea of the ‘Unboxed’, that there’s an African story in a box that needs to be showcased to the wider world. And is why we only specifically accepted submissions from African student filmmakers, African stories.

What is the level of collaboration so far?

It’s encouraging. Keynote one, was given by Daniel Eton. The second keynote was given by Femi Adebayo. And some of our collaborators include MultiChoice, we have masterclasses run by people like Hakeem Effect, Uzoamaka Power and others. Yes, we have proper industry collaborators and other film schools around the world. We have students from at least 15 schools here. There’re Mass Communication Departments from other schools.

What about funding?

In terms of funding, the school has been supportive. And we go and look for funds from people that are really interested in investing and MultiChoice really came through this year and some we would get next year.

What is your take on African culture?

It’s a very beautiful culture and we have a lot of untold stories. In fact, we’ve not begun to scratch the surface. There are stories in Africa, that is why most of the blockbuster stories coming are African stories. I’ve watched interviews of people in Hollywood City say they’ve run out of stories but the stories are here in Africa. So we are beginning to tell those stories in our own way. Before we allow people to come and tell our stories, but now is an era for Africans to tell their own stories themselves.