AFRIKAMERA SERIES: INVISIBLES / 4 EPISODES

Alex Ogou
Ivory Coast 2018 I TV series I Original Version with English Subtitles I 208 min

Artist talk on the topic “Translocalization of Serial Production” with filmmaker Alex Ogou, Prof. Susanne Eichner (media scholar at the Film University Potsdam and expert in transcultural cinema), and Daddy Dibinga (film scholar, SFB 1265, TU Berlin).

This ten-part series by Ivorian filmmaker Alex Ogou focuses on the everyday lives of violent street gangs that make entire districts of Abidjan unsafe. Exciting and touching at the same time, INVISIBLES sheds light on the social phenomenon of disoriented young people who actually only join the gangs to fight for a better life. In September 2018, INVISIBLES was the first francophone African series to be awarded the “Out of Africa” prize and won the prize for the best foreign francophone story at the La Rochelle Festival.

ALEX OGOU, born in 1979 in Gadago (Ivory Coast), is a French-Ivorian actor, screenwriter, production manager and director. He is known on the African continent as an actor in films such as IL VA PLEUVOIR SUR CONAKRY and MORBAYASSA by Cheick Fantamady Camara. Most recently, he celebrated international success as the director of the series CACAO (2020) and Ô BATANGA (2023).

The Long Night of Series was organized in cooperation with the DFG-funded research project “Streaming Series: Spatial Histories and Production Regimes in Afronovelas“ of the SFB 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces at the TU Berlin. The research project, led by the French sociologist Séverine Marguin and the Congolese director and film scholar Daddy Dibinga, focuses on the currently booming French-language series culture in West Africa, in particular on the soap operas from the Ivory Coast and Senegal that are adored by viewers. Against the backdrop of profound changes (globalization, digitalization, decolonization), the project reconstructs the regime of the West African series industry. Based on a qualitative study, which includes an ethnography on film sets and interviews (n = 60) with film producers and other actors in the industry (such as film critics, public funders, investors and various television broadcasters and providers), they identify various production constellations. What is special about this industry is that it emerges in a globalized way: it is not limited to national borders, but develops across different scales, from hyperlocal to subregional, continental to global. It is the power symmetries between these constellations with variable geometries that are the focus of the analyses.