Artist Biographies

JEAN-MARIE TENO

That's why I make films -- to prove I'm not a sheep and to involve people in their own destiny.—Jean-Marie Teno

Jean Marie Teno is one of Africa’s premiere documentary filmmakers, known for his insights into Africa’s colonial past and post-colonial present. He was born in 1954 in Famleng, Cameroon. In 1977 he moved to France (where he still lives) and studied audiovisual communication, receiving an M.A. from the University of Valenciennes. He worked in journalism for a time. The story goes that while interviewing the great director Ousmane Sembène, he so impressed the veteran director with the seriousness and perceptiveness of his questions that Sembène asked him why he was not making films himself. Téno soon took the director’s advice to heart and began making short documentaries and fiction shorts. His short documentaries include Schubbah (1983), Hommage (1984), Bikutsi Water Blues (1988), Mister Foot (1991), and La Tete dans les Nuages (1994); his fiction shorts include Fièvre Jaune Taximan (1985) and La Gifle et la Caresse (1987).

His 1992 feature documentary, Afrique, Je Te Plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You), was well received in the West, placing him in the forefront of young African directors. This personal documentary is a powerful indictment of the cultural “fleecing” of Cameroon (and thereby Africa as a whole) over the last 100 years by the three European countries that colonized it--France, Britain, and Germany. Teno's voice off-screen explains his intention: “I sought the relationship of cause and effect between the unbearable past, with its colonial violence, and the present. I sought the reason why a land with well-structured traditional societies changed into an incompetent state.” The film uses a fascinating modernist style to tell its story, bringing together material from a variety of sources (forgotten newsreels, present-day television and press clippings, colonialist memoirs, a satirical nightclub act, memories of his own upbringing and education) to create a dynamic, nervous mix.

Teno made his first feature film, Clando (shown at the 8th CFAF), in 1996. It tells the story of a Cameroonian computer programmer who for political reasons has been reduced to living as a “clando,” driving a clandestine, unregistered taxicab through the anarchic streets of Douala. His more recent documentaries include Chef!/Chief! (1999), Vacances au pays/A Trip to the Country (2000), Le Mariage d’Alex/Alex’s Wedding (2003), and Le Malentendu Colonial/The Colonial Misunderstanding (2005).

Teno is currently Visiting Artist at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

SANDY CIOFFI

Seattle-based filmmaker Sandy Cioffi uses film to raise awareness and produce social change. A professor of film and video at Seattle Central Community College, Cioffi has made many films on many subjects, including the challenges to human rights in a post-9/11 world (And Justice For All, 2003), living with AIDS (Crocodile Tears, 1997), and drug and alcohol prevention (Friends Like That and Will, 2005). She has done documentary work in Northen Ireland, Central America, and South Africa.

Her current film project was made in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In 2005 Cioffi was in Nigeria filming the building of a library funded partly by an American non-profit called Global Citizen Journey, partly by a Nigerian student group, and partly by Chevron. She became aware of the terrible condition of the delta residents, whose homes, culture, and livelihood were falling apart due to the impact of the oil industry there. Despite the enormous profits being made by the oil companies and the federal government, the local people found themselves increasingly and incongruously in poverty. Cioffi came to realize that she was sitting on a powder keg that was about to explode in a series of kidnappings and acts of armed violence. She went home, raised money, and returned to film for a month in order to tell this crucial story that has not yet been fully told. The result is Sweet Crude, now in its final post-production.

For more information about Cioffi, and online access to many of her films, go to www.sandycioffi.com.