Toward new African languages of protest: African documentary films and human rights

With the introduction of new recording and editing technologies, documentary film production has witnessed important growth and diversification, but the process of creating and consolidating a viable and solid documentary film production environment still faces numerous challenges which must be the necessary starting point for any thorough discussion of the relationship between documentary films and human rights in Africa today. In order to tackle these issues, this chapter begins with a section that, through the discussion of a wide range of materials collected between 2012 and 2013 for a continent-wide, team-based research project on the state of the documentary film industry across Africa, provides a comprehensive (although inevitably general) analysis of the main challenges that African documentary filmmakers face today. This analysis opens up the space for a critical discussion of the interaction between human rights discourses and documentary film production in the continent. Human rights discourses have been the object of much scholarly debate in Africa, and a discussion of these debates in relation to the challenges highlighted in the first section helps better understanding the field of tensions within which African documentary filmmakers are operating and the original aesthetic and narrative solutions that are emerging from it.