Make Africa known from within, “and not from without, as has always been done”, is the purpose of Mane Cisneros for seventeen years, with cinema as a tool and as a cultural medium for the continent. In recognition of that work, The Kresala de San Sebastián film club awards him its annual award this afternoon in an event that will take place this afternoon at 7:00 p.m. at the Principal Theater of San Sebastián, and which will be accompanied by the screening of a film chosen by the award-winning, Lesotho production ‘Mother I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You ‘, directed by Notice Jeremiah Moses. “It is like a heartrending cry, with which a son writes to his mother, from all the pain of the breakup, and where that mother is Africa, the continent itself and Lesotho society,” explains Cisneros. “I would define it as an arrow, a song torn of love and pain towards the African continent of one of his children, who to grow up has had to leave.”
Madrilenian of Extremadura origin, Mane Cisneros assures that the Kresala award It has “moved him a lot because it responds in some way to a good part of the work that I have been doing for so many years, to try to change the image that we have of Africa through cinema, as a tool of knowledge. And that this award comes from the hand of a cinephile institution means that there is also a recognition of the cinemas of Africa, not only from a perspective of cooperation and human rights, but as a cultural product, as cinema itself with its own value. So it is a pride and a great joy «.
Unknown relationship
An anthropologist by training, for many years, Mane Cisneros was more closely linked to Latin America. But his interest in Africa came when «I returned to Spain after five years abroad, and decided to go live in Rate. AND there I faced that constant passage of the Strait, those boats, those deaths, to that end of so many dreams. I thought that cinema could be an important knowledge tool, and then I realized that we are so close, but we live with our backs to Africa. What dominates our relationship with that continent is more ignorance than anything else «.
The rest came from the vocation of Mane Cisneros, apart from anthropology: “I’ve always been a very cinephile,” she says. This has given rise to seventeen years of the dissemination of African cinema, through the African Film Festival, FCAT, which created and directs, the only competitive competition existing in Spain and Latin America dedicated to the dissemination of cinematographies from the African continent and of their diaspora. «We distribute non-profit African cinema from the festival itself, through a project that we created fifteen years ago and is called Cinenómada and which aims to guarantee the programming of African films throughout the cultural circuit, universities, town halls, film clubs, festivals … «.
«We must jump from that idea of Africa as a continent under construction in every sense, that preconceived idea that African cinema is not good in principle, and learn to appreciate it and read those new languages and different ways of counting«, Highlights Mane Cisneros, who is also the founder of the African Cinema Diffusion and Documentation Laboratory, in collaboration with the University of Seville. She has recently been awarded the rank of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
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