Guelwaar. 1992. Senegal. Written and directed by Ousmane Sembene. With Abou Camara, Marie Augustine Diatte, Yama Diedhiou. 16mm. In French and Wolof with English subtitles. 115 min.
Presented by Film at Lincoln Center (formerly the Film Society of Lincoln Center), the prestigious New York Film Festival was founded in 1963. It was not until 1991 that Film at Lincoln Center opened the Walter Reade Theater and began year-round programming. The project was the crowning achievement of longtime executive director Joanne Koch, who hired Richard Peña in 1988 as program director, overseeing the year-round programming as well as heading the New York Film Festival’s selection committee. In his remarkable 25-year career, Peña widened the international scope of Film at Lincoln Center, through his own capacious approach and vast knowledge, and through enduring partnerships such as the New York African Film Festival, founded in 1993 by Mahen Bonetti and presented annually at the Walter Reade Theater. The first edition of the festival launched with the New York premiere of Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar, a seriocomic political drama about the mysterious death of a Christian leader and political activist in Senegal whose body goes missing before his funeral, and whose corpse is mistaken for a man interred at an Islamic cemetery.