Henri Duparc

Henri Duparc was born on the eighteenth of August 1941 at Forecariah, in French Guinea, the son of a Guinean father of the Susu community and a mother of the Mandinka community. He was raised at the family relocation to Côte d'Ivoire in the principal late-1940s French West African colonial period.

He completed his secondary education at Abidjan in 1960 — at the principal post-1960 Ivorian independence period — and travelled to Belgrade in 1960 on a Yugoslav government scholarship to study at the principal Belgrade Film Academy under the Yugoslav neorealist masters.

He completed the Belgrade Film Academy diploma in film direction in 1965 — and studied further at the Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) at Paris from 1965 to 1967.

He returned to Abidjan in 1968 and was hired as a junior director at the principal Ivorian state Société Ivoirienne de Cinéma at the principal post-1968 Ivorian state cinema-building period. He held the principal Société Ivoirienne de Cinéma director position from 1968 to 1979.

He directed his first feature film, Mouna ou le rêve d'un artiste, in 1969 — a seventy-five-minute drama of an Ivorian sculptor's relationship to the principal post-independence Ivorian commercial-art market.

He directed Abusuan in 1972 — an eighty-minute drama of an Ivorian extended-family compound household — and L'Herbe sauvage in 1977, a one-hundred-and-five-minute drama of an Ivorian rural-to-urban migrant family.

He founded the Focale 13 production company at Abidjan in 1980 — the principal Ivorian independent-cinema production company of the post-1980 Ivorian period — and produced and directed approximately eight feature films across the post-1980 Focale 13 commercial period.

He directed Bal poussière in 1988 — a ninety-minute comedy of an Ivorian rural-aristocratic polygamist's marriage to a sixth wife. Bal poussière was the principal commercial-comedy hit of post-1988 West African cinema and screened across approximately one hundred West African commercial cinemas at the principal Bal poussière West African theatrical run.

He directed Le Sixième doigt in 1990 — a ninety-minute comedy of an Ivorian birth-defect-and-village-superstition narrative — and Une couleur café in 1997, a comedy of an Ivorian-French interracial romance.

He was the principal comic-realism auteur of West African cinema across the 1980s and 1990s — at a period in which the principal West African cinema register was dominated by the principal post-independence political-realism tradition. He brought the principal commercial-comedy register to the principal post-1988 West African commercial-cinema audience.

He died at Paris on the eighteenth of April 2006 of complications of cancer, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the director of Bal poussière.