During the First World Festival of Black Arts, held in April 1966 in Dakar (Sénégal), a group of African filmmakers and audiovisual technicians discussed the challenges facing African and postcolonial cinema. Our article aims to contribute to the historiographical debate by highlighting the importance of the festival in shaping an agenda of African cinema that envisioned the creation of pan-African entities designed to promote the film industry across the continent. Sixty years after the events that took place in the Senegalese capital, an analysis of documents preserved in the archives of the Musée du quai Branly and in the collections of the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University in Bloomington sheds light on some of the dilemmas faced during the early development of African cinema in the first years of the postcolonial era.
Sílvio Marcus de Souza Correa (Thu,) studied this question.