SA director wins top festival prize
South African director Zola Maseko has won the top prize at Africa’s premier cinema festival with Drum, a film set amid the bars and jazz clubs of 1950s Johannesburg.
Maseko was awarded on Saturday the Etalon d’Or de Yennenga – the Golden Stallion of Yennenga – and a cash prize of $20,000 at the Fespaco film festival in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso.
The Etalon d’Argent de Yennenga, or second prize, went to La Chambre Noire (The Black Room) by Moroccan director Hasan Benjelloun. The film tells of torture and imprisonment in 1970s Morocco.
Third prize in the feature film category was awarded to Tasuma le Feu, the tale of an elderly Burkinabe soldier who fought for France and is still waiting for his pension, by director Daniel Kollo Sanou of Burkina Faso.
Twenty feature-length films from across the continent were competing for the top honours at the week-long Pan-African Cinema and Television Festival, or Fespaco.
The festival is held every two years in Ouagadougou and showcases the best work from the continent’s directors and producers.