Bekolo Biography

Traditionally, young francophone Africans immigrate to France but for the past decades, more and more are coming to Canada but their efforts and sacrifices to become Canadian remain invisible to the general public. Jean-Pierre Bekolo's case illustrates very well how the Canadian system was able to make a filmmaker and a black African twice invisible. Instead of becoming a Canadian citizen, he has become a world citizen and his real world has become a fiction world.

If Canada and Cameroon have one thing in common it's the French and English official languages. But not only that, in Cameroon Canadian high school educated the elite of the country. That's the case of Jean-Pierre his brother Emile and his father.

Jean-Pierre first comes to Canada in October 1989 to visit his brother in Montreal. He has just finished the French school of media Institut National de l'Audiovisuel INA where he had a scholarship from Cameroon to study television production. In Montreal, Jean-Pierre gets passionate about the Indian problem of the Kanawaghe reserve and uses all his savings to shoot a film in the winter of 1989. When he tries to get a broadcaster interested he is being answered that they are not interested in "an African point of view on the Indian problem in Canada". That story of finding his own identity will be recurrent in Jean-Pierre relation with his work and with Canada. In the summer of 1990, Canadian are transfixed by the dramatic images of Mohawk warriors in an armed standoff with the Canadian army. Jean-Pierre's film remained uncompleted.

Jean-Pierre like his brother Emile who is now Canadian and his father attended Canadian Catholic high school in Cameroon runned by the Sacre Coeur congregation. Canadian school were the best in the country and Canadian brothers educated most of the local elite. Jean-Pierre's father became a top police commissioner in the country, he was able to pay for his other son Emile to study in Canada despite the costs. Emile attended HEC de Montreal and his tutor in Canada is a Cameroonian diplomat who will become his father in law. The presence of Emile, the older son in Canada will make it the turntable of Bekolo family life. A cousin living in Swiss will immigrate to Canada, a younger brother artist, a sister to study communication with her daughter, the mother will come for a year visit and obviously Jean-Pierre will file an immigration application. Before his father died the last family gathering will happen in Montreal where Jean-Pierre will meet his father for the last time.

All this family move to Canada doesn't help Jean-Pierre career as a filmmaker. France has much more funding for African filmmaker even if they don't live in France. This is where Jean-Pierre will tap into to get the funding of the first feature film "Quartier Mozart" he wrote, produced, directed and edited at the age of 24. The film is a satirical take on his family life with the authoritarian and polygamist police chief father. The film is a success in Cannes 1992, the French claim to have "discovered a talent African filmmaker". The film is shown in Montreal in August 1992 in the presence of his mother visiting Canada for the first time. Quartier Mozart is Simon Durivage's coup de Coeur (Simon Durivage is a famous Quebec political news anchor) on the news. Serge Losique (President of Montreal Film Festival) invites Jean-Pierre at a lunch to meet\ Roger Ebert (Famous US film critic) but naively, Jean-Pierre doesn't know who he is. He could only see that he had a black wife.
Jean-Pierre will tour the world with Quartier Mozart (India, Jerusalem, Goteborg, Ouagadougou, Dublin, London, Chicago, Washington, Locarno, Cannes…) entirely shot in Cameroon as the Cameroonian filmmaker while he was already a Canadian landed immigrant. Even if being Cameroonian was sometimes sexier than being Canadian, there was no doubt that Jean-Pierre was imprisoned in an identity he would have had hard time to change.

Jean-Pierre became landed immigrant of Canada as a skilled worker; he is an editor. He graduate from INA as an editor, he actually edited himself Quartier Mozart. Editing was his first passion in Cameroon when he joined the brand new television in 1996 while he was still studying physics at the University of Yaounde. He was trained to edit in the style of Eisenstein's La Ligne Generale by Roy Lekus a Canadian editor and filmmaker living in Paris who will mentor Jean-Pierre in the early days. Godard says that "editing is about putting together things that have nothing to do together" that's what Jean-Pierre seems to be doing with his life and career. Jean-Pierre keeps travelling. This will keep him out of any box Canadian administration system can put someone. Ten years after filing the immigration application in Canada, Jean-Pierre has become a citizen of the world; may be that's what being Canadian is about.

In 1993, Jean-Pierre meets Jackie Jones, a film critic at the Black Film Review who invite him to Memphis. Memphis the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated fascinates Jean-Pierre more than that it's the idea of partnering with young African American to make films we care about and mixing the African feel with the African American one. This is how Jean-Pierre decides to make Coming From Africa, a satirical film in the vein of Quartier Mozart about an African guy who is shipped in a FedEx box to America. Jean-Pierre is welcomed in town by the Mayor who will give him the keys of the city, David Porter, Rev Samuel Billy Kyles etc… The film is shot pre-edited in Chicago with the help of friends but has never been released, as Jean-Pierre had to run on another project commissioned by the British Film Institute in Zimbabwe.

Quartier Mozart got a nomination for the British Awards along with Taratino Reservoir Dogs. 1995 is the celebration of 100 years of cinema, the British Film Institute is making a series with Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears, Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci, George Miller, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, the virtual african is chosen to represent Africa what he doesn't know how to do. Aristotle's Plot will be shot in Zimbabwe with South African actors, German producer, British money. Rebecca Garrett the Toronto video artist will shoot the making off.
Aristotle's Plot won't be edited until a year later. In the mean time, Jean-Pierre moves to Toronto with only one connection Noah Cowan from Toronto film festival. Noah will introduce him to Cameron Bailey who wrote great reviews on Jean-Pierre's Quartier Mozart but never met him. In Toronto, Jean-Pierre gets an editing job for an infomercial show called Dial-A-Date produced by David Bronstein. And Andrew Wells.
A few months later, when Jean-Pierre is happy to have finally settled in Canada, he receives a call from a the French producer Jacques Bidou who would only get involve in completing Artistotle's Plot if Jean-Pierre leaves Toronto and comes to Paris for the editing. At first, Jean-Pierre will turn down the offer before he changes his mind. Jean-Pierre will manage to get the sound design done in Toronto by Steve Munro and the film will also premiere at the Toronto film festival in 1996 before shown at Sundance in January 1997. At the festival, Jean-Pierre meets for the first time the actor Maka Kotto originally from who has succeeded in becoming a real Canadian. Maka Kotto has heard about Quartier Mozart at home in Cameroon where the film is a big hit. He lives in Montreal with his family and has been able to work regularly on Canadian films. Jean-Pierre concludes that it's easier for an actor than a director like him.

The Last Chapter, Jean-Pierre's next project gets Alliance interest. The concept of the film is about two black Harlem cop from Chester Himes' novels, Coffin and Gravedigger who gets to France to ask their author not to kill them. Jean-Pierre flies to Los Angeles to meet with Mike Horowitz. He lives at the Canadian actress Tonya Lee Williams from the Young and the Restless he met in Toronto in the festival. The project won't go any further but Jean-Pierre would like to understand the city and decide to follow with his video an old photographer who is the sort of black memory of Los Angeles, Roland Charles (another film never edited). Jean-Pierre discovers that Quartier Mozart has made it in Blockbuster and the film is a hit in US Colleges. Jean-Pierre is invited at Virginia Tech in 1998 as an Artist in Residence and makes a film with students (a film never edited).
It seems like the reason why Jean-Pierre's work never get edited is because he is a homeless trying to survive as a filmmaker when he knows his work won't have an outcome.

The information Age hit the world, Jean-Pierre dreams about a broadcasting outcome for his "African take on the world". He joins the new utopia of the Internet and comes up with the concept of GlobReatual. GlobReatual is exactly the solution to Jean-Pierre's problem. How to recreate one world for everybody that is real for them on a virtual medium fulfilling human rituals? Jean-Pierre presents is GlobReatual concept to Andre Davanture, the founder of Atria, the organization that has produced hundreds of African films for the last 30 years including Yeelen by Souleymane Cisse. The organization is about to shut down, with Andre, Jean-Pierre raises the question of what is the next step after the Nouvelle Vague and all the 1968 movements? GlobReatual will starts like an extension of Atria to capitalize on the past. And every Tuesday, Jean-Pierre organizes Les Paris du Mardi gathering black intellectuals and artists in Paris. Les Paris du Mardi will become at television show Canal France International (CFI) will cancel before it is broadcasted.
With the help of a Vancouver based non-profit organization, Jean-Pierre takes a group of young Canadian just graduated from college to Cameroon to create that GlobReatual Television. The Canadian are mixed with Cameroonian and they produce together about sixty hours of original programming also never edited. Sarah Shamash a Canadian student who was part of that dream project remembers it as the most exciting experience she ever had.

Jean-Pierre has to run one more time. Out of money, he gets a job offer by Joanne Hershfield a Canadian professor famous for her work on Mexican cinema at University of North Carolina who has been teaching Quartier Mozart in her world cinema class. Jean-Pierre is a star in the Campus, he makes a horror film with students (another film never edited). He also takes a group of student in a summer class to Paris in program he has created Making Movies In Paris. (not edited).

As Jean-Pierre Bekolo is now about to shoot his next feature film Les Saignantes, the question of if this is going to be a canadian film or it will be a film made by a canadian, Jean-Pierre answers the inspiration was African, the critical approach francophone and the style north American. Is this Canadian? "I don't know anymore. What matters is to be myself and do what I am supposed to do. The rest I leave it those who are interested in boxing people, classifying them, creating frontiers, setting standards. At the end of the day I prefer to stay transparent." In the meantime, University of Duke is waiting for his availability to be an Artist in Residence on Campus.

Classified as a Visible Minority Jean-Pierre Bekolo who has been until now invisible to the Canadian his country of adoption is in this autoprotrait/autobiography gives visibility to the incredible work he has accomplish and that has remained invisible.