SYNOPSIS
​Diallo sets out with his camera in search of the birth of filmmaking in Guinea. Charming and determined, he traces his country's film heritage and history and reveals the importance of film archives.

"The Cemetery of Cinema is the first feature documentary film by Guinean director Thierno Souleymane Diallo (born in 1983). It was presented in various festivals, among others at the 2023 Berlinale, where it was nominated for the Panorama Audience Award and the Documentary Award.
In an interview for the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée), which funded the film, Souleymane Diallo says: On ne sort jamais du documentaire. La fiction, j’y viendrai sans doute un jour [. . .]. (“We never leave the documentary genre. Fiction, yes, I will certainly come to it one day [. . .].”) As a documentary, though, The Cemetery of Cinema is haunted by, suffused with fiction in many ways. Indeed, it is the quest for a lost film, titled Mouramani, the first film made by a francophone African director, Mamadou Touré, in 1953. The film is lost, i.e. there is no surviving version, no traces other than, for example, a few lines in a journalistic review: on March 31, 1955, the critic of Le Monde, the French daily, wrote in a condescending tone that the film is “a clumsy and naïve sketch” (une ébauche maladroite et naïve), but with “a kind of languor that is not without charm” (une sorte de langueur qui n’est pas sans charme). If you search the web for details about the plot, you find only vague and contradictory accounts.
So The Cemetery of Cinema is a documentary about a film that doesn’t exist anymore and has to be reimagined as what it must have been. Last year, in her review for the French daily Libération (July 5, 2023), Sandra Onana describes such a revival of a ghost film as “a remake without a model” (un remake sans modèle). Unearthing the first francophone African film and fictionalizing it are one and the same gesture, a gesture that is all the more important since it digs into what colonial history has erased, i.e. the beginnings of African cinema, and into the consequences of this erasure until today.
Indeed, last year, Jacques Mandelbaum, who reviewed The Cemetery of Cinema for Le Monde, saw in it “a bitter assessment [un bilan, assez amer] of the state [. . .] of African cinema in general:” “Theaters fallen in disuse, looted warehouses, cameras and projectors stolen to be resold to pot manufacturers, burnt and buried film [. . .]: this is the sad picture of an art form sacrificed to political earthquakes, the inconsistency of governments, and the pangs of poverty.” Through colonial and postcolonial geopolitics, what we also get a glimpse of is the ecology of cinema, I mean: its ruins, its remains, its waste management.
This is the landscape through which The Cemetery of Cinema walks us, in what we could call a barefoot road movie. The protagonist of this filmic journey towards a vanishing filmic history is the director himself, who turns into a personification of cinema, carrying his camera as if it were a prosthetic eye and holding his microphone above his head, with a furry windscreen that looks like a hairy wig. When he leaves Conakry, the capital of Guinea, for Paris, Souleymane Diallo becomes, in the streets of the French metropole, a cinematic billboard advertising for the lost film.
Becoming-camera, becoming-microphone, becoming-poster, in sum: becoming-cinema. This is where the road movie of The Cemetery of Cinema takes us, but in a very particular way. Since its journey is headed towards a film that is not a film, a non-film, we could also say that cinema under duress, cinema in dire straits becomes the pursuit of cinema by other means."

(from the introduction to the film by Peter Szendy, David Herlihy Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities)