Festival panafricain d'Alger 1969

Following its independence from France in 1962, Algeria developed a status as a space for liberation movements and postcolonial thought, and the ruling FLN party had links to a multitude of such groups across the continent.[2] The Pan-African Cultural Festival was held as a celebration of African identity and culture, and a chance to unite and promote interaction between liberation movements,[2] as well as an opportunity for the Algerian government to promote the newly independent country as a leader on the continent. Every African country sent a delegation of musicians, writers, artists, and intellectuals who joined members of the African diaspora as well as a contingent of African-American activists, musicians, and writers, including Nina Simone and Maya Angelou, and a delegation from the Black Panther Party, led by Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, who had recently fled an arrest warrant in the United States.[1] Over five-thousand people travelled to Algeria for the festival in what has been referred to as “an unprecedented—and since unrivalled—moment of anti-imperialist unity”.[3] Amílcar Cabral, a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean activist and key postcolonial thinker, remarked in a press conference that “Christians make pilgrimages to the Vatican, Muslims go to Mecca, and national liberation movements go to Algeria”.[2] The festival began with an opening day parade, in which four thousand participants from all the represented nations and groups marched through Algiers, interacting with locals and performing regional dance and music.[1] The festival period saw a variety of different events encompassing dance, music, drama, sculpture, and painting, and events were hosted both in national theatres and halls and on the street.[4] Notable performances over the 12-day event included concerts by Miriam Makeba and Nina Simone, as well as a much-lauded improvisatory jazz collaboration between Archie Shepp and Southern Algerian Tuareg musicians.[2][1]

In Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, William Klein documents a variety of the festival's concerts, exhibitions, street marches, and performances, as well as the preparations and rehearsals for the festival. He blends images of interviews made with writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for independence, and African culture. Recorded in the film are the dozens of notable artists, musicians, activists, and political figures, as well as performances from Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, and Archie Shepp.

The film failed to generate much publicity upon its release, and in fact was "hardly distributed at all in Africa or in the Third World"; in Algeria, it was "shelved away".[5] The film was selected for a screening at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, and entered the art-house cinema circuit in France as a result, to little fanfare.[5] The decision to employ Klein with hopes of reaching a European audience largely did not pay off; the Algerian cinema community largely rejected the film, while the film's one-hundred percent Algerian-based production made it harder to circulate. Furthermore, Klein himself did not promote the film at all, according to cinema historian Olivier Hadouchi.[5] In 2009, a new edition of the film was screened in Algeria as part of a 50th Anniversary edition of the Pan-African Cultural Festival in collaboration with European TV Channel ARTE, who restored and distributed both of Klein's 1969 Algerian films.[3][2]

• Festival panafricain d'Alger 1969 at IMDb

• African Film Festival of Cordoba-FCAT (license CC BY-SA)