Oumarou Ganda’s biography, fact, career, awards, net worth and life story

Oumarou Ganda (1935 – 1 January 1981) was a Nigerien director and actor who helped deliver African cinema to worldwide consideration within the Sixties and Seventies.

 

Life

Ganda was born in Niamey, the capital of Niger, in 1935 and was of Djerma ethnicity. He accomplished his main research in Niamey and on the age of 16 joined the French Far East Expeditionary Corps as a soldier from 1951 to 1955. After spending two years in Asia in the course of the First Indochina Conflict he returned to Niger, the place he was unable to seek out work. He emigrated to Côte d’Ivoire and have become a longshoreman within the port of Abidjan. There he met French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Rouch was within the Nigerien neighborhood in Côte d’Ivoire and employed Ganda as a statistician for his analysis on immigration.

It was Rouch who launched Ganda to the cinema. Ganda had a small position in Rouch’s 1957 movie Zazouman de Treichville, and the lead position in Moi, un Noir (I, a Negro) in 1958. A couple of years later he returned to Niamey, the place he turned concerned within the Franco-Nigerien Cultural Middle. Within the Middle’s Tradition and Cinema membership he met technicians who supplied coaching in directing, digital camera, and sound, and he turned an assistant technician. The membership produced a number of movies, and in 1968 organized a screenplay contest, for which Ganda wrote the script of his first movie, Cabascabo, primarily based on his experiences in Indochina. He continued making movies all through the Seventies, lots of which acquired worldwide acclaim and had been automobiles of social commentary in what was then a single occasion state. His most well-known, Le Wazzou Polygame (1970) gained the primary FESPACO Movie Competition Finest Movie Award. Along with his dramatic movies, Ganda accomplished a number of documentaries and was engaged on one on the time of his demise of a coronary heart assault on January 1, 1981.

Posthumous honors

Amongst his posthumous honors, a serious cultural middle, efficiency, and library advanced in Niamey, Le Centre Culturel Oumarou GANDA (C.C.O.G) was named for him in 1981, shortly after his demise.

Because the winner of the Finest Movie award on the first annual FESPACO movie pageant, upon his demise FESPACO started awarding an African Function Movie Award named the Oumarou Ganda Prize.

 

Movies

• Cabascabo (1968, 45 minutes, black and white, filmed solely within the Zarma language) Autobiographical movie that offers with Ganda’s service within the French Expeditionary Corps in Indochina. A younger soldier sees his comrades die in battle for a trigger utterly overseas to them. Cabascabo premiered in Paris in 1968 and was additionally proven at Cannes. It gained a Diploma on the sixth Moscow Worldwide Movie Competition, the worldwide critics’ prize at Málaga, and an honorable point out on the Carthage Movie Competition.
• Le Wazzou Polygame (1970, 50 minutes, 16 mm, shade, Zarma language) Ganda’s second movie offers with polygamy and compelled marriage. The movies is crucial of Nigerien society and those that maintain energy in Africa. Amongst different awards, it acquired the primary FESPACO grand prize in 1972.
• Saïtane (1972, 64 minutes, 16 mm, shade, Zarma language) One other movie of social criticism through which a marabout serves as a go-between for an adulterous girl and her rich lover.
• L’Exilé (1980, 90 minutes, 16mm, shade) Impressed by an African folks story. The usage of folks tales as inspiration is one in every of Ganda’s vital contributions to African cinema.

• Movies by Oumarou Ganda offered in Cannes. festival-cannes.com Accessed 2009-03-30.
• “sixth Moscow Worldwide Movie Competition (1969)”. MIFF. Retrieved 2012-12-21. 
• The Historical past of FESPACO. BBC World Service, 2003.