A film critic whom I met at a social event once said to me that he found my films romanesques, or story-like. He never wrote a line about me though, ignoring my work as a form that had long been struggling to be accepted as ‘Cinema’: documentary. That is a tale long past, of course, and I shall not dwell on the hurdles that had to be jumped to reach today's recognition of documentary as an integral part of cinema. But the scope of officially sanctioned documentary is still proving to be slow in accommodating original and challenging non-fiction work from all over the world. It seems as if the space for documentary in Europe and in France in particular has become the space for selective indignation, and one that is increasingly occupied by bourgeois filmmakers who turn serious issues into a pretext for a contemplative approach to convey a distanced indignation that has the flavour of being politically engaged, without at any time challenging a social order within which they seem to be comfortable.

In such a context, and in today's global context, what space for minority expressions? Fight to be the ‘acceptable and accepted Other’ that legitimates the exclusion of the many? Mimetism and adherence to schools of thought and form that would have relegated me and my concerns to the backyard of history and memory were simply for me unacceptable.

In the early 1980s in Paris when my interest in cinema took off, the films I enjoyed watching were the European and Latin America avant-garde. When I began to make my own films, I could not help but make a cinema that was political in its form and content, and yet at the same time, I wanted to use cinema, in the words of Ousmane Sembene, as a tool for liberation. And the first step of this liberation was to deconstruct, in a comprehensive way, the mechanisms of oppression that continued to maintain the African continent in a state of chaos and poverty despite its abundance of intellectual and natural resources.