The Film Study Center McMillan-Stewart Fellowship gallery

Gallery of previous McMillan-Stewart Fellowship events and screenings	The McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking was established at the Film Study Center in 1997 with a generous gift from Genevieve McMillan in memory of her late friend, Reba Stewart, in support of outstanding filmmakers, especially of francophone African origin. The endowment provides both a fellowship for the laureate, while they visit Harvard and share their work with the University community, and also for the purchase of a representative example of the fellow's oeuvre for preservation in the Harvard Film Archive.

Idrissa Ouedraogo with Genevieve McMillan	1998: Idrissa Ouedraogo Ouedraogo is one of Africa's most acclaimed directors and was named the first recipient of the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking. His unmannered, non-simplistic style has been compared to the styles of Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray. Born in 1954 in the village of Banfora in Upper Volta - now Burkina Faso - Ouedraogo studied film in Ouagadougou, Kiev, and Paris. He directed his first feature film Yam Daabo (The Choice) which brought him acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. His second feature Yaaba (Grandmother) won the International Critics Award at Cannes and third feature Tilai (The Law) received the Special Jury Prize. Some of his later works Samba Traore and Afrique, mon Afrique have also had critical success among Western critics and European audiences.

Abderrahmane Sissako with Genevieve McMillan	1999: Abderrahmane Sissako Born in Mauritania, trained at the Moscow Film Institute, and working in France, Sissako has always put Africa at the center of his work, elaborating his narratives around the lights and the colors of his continent, even though the real subject of his films is exile. His famous 1993 work, October, is about being African in Russia. Sissako's perspective on his childhood, from bustling Paris: "I belong to a culture in which I learned at 15 that I was born on October 13. That is to say that dates for us don't have the same value and that the perception of time is different." His influences? "Aime Césaire has been a support for me most of my life. He is the author that I read and reread. But another very important author to me was Frantz Fanon. The introduction of Black Skin, White Masks is very close to this new film, La vie sur terre ." In Sabriya (1997), Sissako creates a wonderful drama about the impact of the modern world on traditional Arabic society. La vie sur terre (1998) is a gorgeously conceived poem contemplating life at the end of the centrury in the first and third world - by a filmmaker with a foot planted in each of them.

Med Hondo with former HFA curator John Gianvito	2000: Med Hondo One of Africa's most acclaimed directors, Abid Mohamed Medonn Hondo was born in Mauritania in 1936. At the age of twenty-five, he left his native Mauritania and went to Marseilles, France, where he worked an assortment of jobs. He later moved to Paris and worked as a cook in one of the city's grand restaurants. During his off hours, Hondo took drama courses. In 1966, with African actors, he founded a theatrical company called "Shango," and featured African playwrights. Hondo began production of his first feature film, Soleil O in 1969. Praised at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival both for its thematic content and the originality of it formal presentation Soleil O takes its title from a West African lament about people transported from Africa to be sold as slaves in the Carribean. Although labeled a "militant" filmmaker, across his career Med Hondo has developed rich and powerful forms of storytelling, drawn from the West African oral tradition of the griots. These are films that frocibly seek to dismantle what the director has called "the narrative and psychological mechanisms of traditional [Hollywood] dramaturgy," in hopes of raising consciousness. From West Indies, a vast musical fresco covering nearly four-hundred years in the history of the French West Indians, from their enslavement to their present-day displacement in France, to Sarraounia, the valiant story of a West African queen who opposed French colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century, Hondo has offered up to the viewer impassioned examinations of colonial history and its consequences.

Souleymane Cisse	2001: Souleymane Cisse One of Africa's leading directors, Cissé has crafted a body of films that combine visual elegance with Marxist ideology and allegorical storytelling. Born in 1940, Cissé began his film career as a projectionist and photographer in Mali. After studying cinema in the Soviet Union for seven years, he returned to Mali, where he cut his teeth making newsreels and documentaries. His first fiction film, Cinq Jours d'une vie (Five Days in a Life, 1972), launched his career and gained critical attention for the burgeoning African film movement. Three years later, Cissé directed the first feature film in his native language of Bambara, The Girl, only to have the film banned by authorities. His masterpiece, hailed by Film Comment as "the best African film ever made," would come a decade and a half later with Yeelen (Brightness, 1987). Drawing on traditional indigenous lifestyles and Malian folklore, Cissé attempts to explore conflicts in Mali society, particularly the conflicts that emerge between the desire for change and the need to preserve tradition.

Ousmane Sembene with Genevieve McMillan Sembene with film scholar Samba Gadjigo Sembene with former HFA curator Bruce Jenkins	2001: Ousmane Sembene The foremost figure in the evolution of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene was the fourth recipient of the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking. Hailing from the former French colony of Senegal, Sembene established himself as one of Africa's leading novelists before turning to cinema as means of reaching a wider audience. His work often centers on identity problems encountered by Africans caught between Africa and Europe, tradition and modernization. The concentrated realism of his early classics evolved into a rich, wide-ranging mixture of black comedy, political allegory, sophisticated satire, traditional African forms, and biting social criticism. In 1987, after nearly a ten-year hiatus from filmmaking, Sembene returned in peak form with Camp do Thiaroye, a powerful tragedy of colonialism, and Guelwaar, a trenchant comedy of contemporary Senegal.

Gaston Kabore with Genevieve McMillan	2002: Gaston Kabore Born in Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and raised in the capital city of Ougadougou, Kaboré maintained a lifelong interest in his family's rural heritage while pursuing studies that eventually led him to the Sorbonne in Paris. There he divided his time between pursuit of an advanced degree in history and his burgeoning interest in the cinema, fed in part by his interest in the representation of Africa abroad and by an encounter with the work of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene (a Fellowship recipient in 2001). Kaboré returned to Burkina Faso in 1976 after completing film school in France and was named director of the Centre National du Cinéma. He also became a teacher at the Institut African d'Etudes Cinématographiques, where his screenwriting and filmmaking courses were augmented by his own early productions. His first feature, Wend Kuuni (1982), was the first full-length film to be made in Burkina Faso, and it launched a career that would by turns mix extraordinary artistic achievement - rewarded by major awards at international festivals and a French César - with significant service to the field, especially as president of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers. Kaboré's films are most often noted for his reclamation of the poetry and clarity of traditional African storytelling and for his singularly lyrical cinematic language. Yet the director has long insisted that his films - like those of other leading African directors - represent a "cinema of urgency," engaged by the attempt to "profoundly explain today's reality."

Moufida Tlatli with Genevieve McMillan	2004: Moufida Tlatli Moufida Tlatli was born in Tunisia in 1947 and trained in Paris in the late 1960s. She was the Middle East's top film editor for two decades before directing her striking debut feature, The Silences of the Palace. The film was selected for the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 1994, where it received Special Mention for the Camera d'Or award and went on to win the International Critics' Award at Toronto and to earn Tlatli the Best Director citation at the All African Film Awards in 1995. Tlatli has continued both her feature filmmaking and her advocacy for the continued importance of an emerging feminist perspective within the Arab world.

Merzak Allouache with Genevieve McMillan	2006: Merzak Allouache Born in Algiers, Merzak Allouache grew up during the Algerian struggle for independence. He studied filmmaking at Paris's celebrated IDHEC, and quickly moved on to directing feature films, documentaries, and television programs. Omar Gatlato (1976), his first feature film, set in the neighborhood of Bab el-Oued in Algiers, was such a success that it changed the course of Algerian cinema. The popularity of Omar Gatlato with Algerian audiences demonstrated to the Algerian film industry that its public had an appetite for complex films that dealt with the realities of Algerian contemporary society, opening the door to other films of the same ilk. In 1994 Merzak returned to this same neighborhood to film Bab el-Oued City. The film captured the beginnings of the civil war that was then spreading across Algeria. Bab el-Oued City garnered the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 1994, as well as the grand prize at the Arab Film Festival in Paris. During a career that has spanned thirty years, Merzak Allouache's films continue to examine the complex history that ties France to its former North African colonies, giving us characters full of intelligence and dignity, caught between their French and Algerian identities.

Fanta Régina Nacro	2007: Fanta Régina Nacro Fanta Régina Nacro studied at the African Institute for Cinematic Studies (INAFEC), the national film school of Burkina Faso, and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she earned a Master’s Degree in Film and Audiovisual Studies. She is the first Burkinabe woman to direct a dramatic film, the short Un certain matin (1991), and has made many shorts which address the AIDS epidemic in Africa, including Vivre Positivement (1993). Her short films Puk Nini (1996) and Un certain matin have been hailed as representing the “African New Wave.” Her last short for the Mama Africa series, A Close-Up on Bintou (2002), won more than twenty prizes in international festivals, and her first feature The Night of Truth (2004) was featured in the touring program of the Global Film Initiative and received screenwriting honors at the San Sebastian Film Festival.