Idrissa Ouédraogo

Idrissa Ouédraogo was born on the twenty-first of January 1954 at Banfora, in the Comoé Province of the Upper Volta, the son of a Mossi father of the Ouagadougou region and a mother of the Bobo community of the south-western Burkina Faso. He was raised in the Mossi village community of the central Burkina Faso.

He enrolled at the Institut Africain d'Études Cinématographiques (INAFEC) at Ouagadougou in 1976 — the principal West African film-training institute of the post-independence period — and completed the INAFEC diploma in cinematography in 1981.

He completed the master's degree in cinema at the Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) at Paris in 1985 and the master's degree at the Sorbonne in 1986.

He directed his first short film, Poko, in 1981 — and his first feature film, Yam Daabo (The Choice), in 1986 — a one-hundred-minute drama of a Mossi family that abandons relief-aid dependency in the drought-stricken Burkinabé north.

He directed Yaaba in 1989 — a ninety-minute reconstruction of a Mossi village child's friendship with an elderly woman accused of witchcraft. Yaaba was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in May 1989 and won the FIPRESCI Prize.

He directed Tilaï in 1990 — an eighty-one-minute reconstruction of a Mossi village tragedy of incestuous love and customary law. Tilaï won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival of May 1990 and the Étalon de Yennenga at FESPACO of February 1991.

He directed Samba Traoré in 1993 — an eighty-five-minute reconstruction of a Mossi village man's return from criminal exile to his ancestral household. Samba Traoré won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival of February 1993.

He directed eight further feature films across the 1990s and 2000s and produced approximately fifteen documentary commissions for French and Burkinabé television.

He served as president of the FESPACO Festival jury at FESPACO of February 1997 and as president of the African Federation of Filmmakers from 1995 to 2001.

He died at Ouagadougou on the eighteenth of February 2018 of complications of a long illness, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the auteur of Yaaba and Tilaï.