Tahar Cheriaa

Tahar Cheriaa was born on the fifth of January 1927 at Sayada, in the Monastir Governorate of the coastal Tunisian Sahel, then under the French Protectorate. Raised among the Tunisian-Arabic communities of the Sahelian littoral, he came of age under colonial rule and began his working life as a schoolteacher in Sfax before entering the Tunisian Ministry of Culture, where he became a leading advocate for cinema as an instrument of cultural self-determination.

In 1966 he founded the Journees Cinematographiques de Carthage, the first Pan-African and Pan-Arab film festival and the oldest such gathering on the African continent. He directed its first five biennial editions, building a platform where filmmakers of Africa and the Arab world could screen work that colonial and commercial distribution had long shut out. He championed emerging directors, among them Souleymane Cisse, Heiny Srour, and Sarah Maldoror, and nurtured a wider culture of cinema clubs.

Cheriaa carried this vision beyond Tunis. In 1969 he helped establish FESPACO in Ouagadougou and co-founded the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), devoted to the infrastructure and education African cinema needed to stand on its own. His 1978 study, known in English as Screens of Abundance or Liberation Cinema in Africa, remains a foundational critique of the politics of film distribution across Africa and the Arab world. He also served as Director of Culture within the International Organisation of La Francophonie and was honoured with the Grand Cordon of National Merit.

He died on the fourth of November 2010 at Ezzahra, and was returned to rest in his native Sayada. The festival he founded endures as his living monument, and the cinema of a continent still walks the road he opened. May his name be honoured wherever African films find their light.