Alain Kassanda Awarded 2025-26 McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking

The Film Study Center is pleased to announce that filmmaker Alain Kassanda has been selected as the 2025-26 McMillan-Stewart Fellow in Distinguished Filmmaking. The McMillan-Stewart Fellowship is hosted by the Film Study Center in collaboration with the Harvard Film Archive, which will screen three of Kassanda’s films February 13 – 23, with the filmmaker in person on February 21 and 23.

Congolese French filmmaker Alain Kassanda (b.1980) has achieved this honor with a set of singularly striking documentaries. Only three films into an auspicious career and running his own production company Ajímatí Films with anthropologist Emilie Guitard, Kassanda has garnered well-deserved accolades for dynamic documentary composites that confront and contest the spectatorship inherent in cinema with an exciting, improvisational attentiveness. Reclaiming and reorienting African history, art and life from the distortions of a colonial lens, Kassanda also exuberantly and subtly reveals his former life as a film programmer; his depth of cinema knowledge—along with music, literature, history—is refreshingly apparent, yet what he chooses to fashion from his sophisticated palette of cinema elements, are all his own: vibrant, layered, radical documents that actively engage with their content and surroundings. Understanding that each film calls for its own vocabulary, its own beautiful arithmetic, Kassanda may incorporate jazz music, intersperse a literary quote, question his intentions, speak to an ancient tree or hand his camera to another.

Direct without overstatement, the films combine intimate observation with a humanistic orchestration as well as spaces where the films seem to relax and take a breath, then roll back into the complicated daily grind of quietly heroic lives. To date, his films have taken place both in Nigeria and his birthplace the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unearthing stories from the past, shaking off the invasive vines and pulling them up close to his lyrical, inquisitive camera, he may study the generational violence from neocolonialism as in his feature debut Colette et Justin or expose the brave beating heart of revolution in action in Coconut Head Generation. Kassanda’s films are engaged interactions with the world that seem unsatisfied with inactivity, inspiring a corresponding inventiveness. As he explains in an interview in Strand Magazine, “Images are sometimes powerless; look what’s happening in Gaza. People are filming their own deaths, we are all watching it live-streamed, but at some point that enables us to gather, like the massive gathering in London, in support of the ceasefire. … Images are two-pronged: they are really important for us to understand and see from a specific perspective and subject and be outraged, but at the same time they are just a starting point for conversation that needs to go beyond the art. Art forms are just there to enable us to move, it’s the action that takes place, not the films, that leads to change.” – Brittany Gravely

Friday February 13 at 7pm
Trouble Sleep
Directed by Alain Kassanda
France/Nigeria 2020, DCP, color, 41 min. Yoruba and English with English subtitles

“What is City? you say. / It’s the bottleneck where all our stories come together. / … It’s not a place of happiness. It’s not a place of misfortune. It’s the calabash of fate.”

Kassanda includes quotes from Patrick Chamoiseau’s exquisite novel Texaco within this kinetic sketch of Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city. Featuring taxi driver Fred—who is ironically a civil engineering student—and Akin who patrols for the transport union, the film flutters between their respective days and worlds in the crowded streets, and a portrait of a city begins to emerge, a city fueled by constant and complex fees and negotiations, the mathematics of which add up to very little return on either Akin’s or Fred’s difficult, dangerous work. Sonically illuminated by cosmic jazz and Afro-beats, Kassanda moves in close and zooms back out to intimately comprehend the contradictions and humanity within the intricate patterns and rhythms of a hustling city.

Saturday February 21 at 7pm
Alain Kassanda in person
Colette et Justin
Directed by Alain Kassanda
France/Belgium 2022, DCP, color & b/w, 89 min. French and Lingala with English subtitles

Kassanda’s first feature-length documentary stars his grandparents who lived through Belgium’s colonization and later worked at the forefront of Congolese independence. Within this dense personal archaeology and much-needed historical corrective, the filmmaker poetically sifts through the complications and contradictions of lives under white, western rule—using the oppressor’s own visual archive (since the colonized were not allowed to photographically document) in a delicate dance between revelatory reappropriation and traumatic re-exposure. While decoding staged productions and exposing incriminating documents, Kassanda searches for the remains of a stolen culture and reveals a violent, racist power structure that continues to reverberate in modern-day Kinshasa and the diaspora beyond. Meanwhile, his grandfather, educated and urged to excel within a rigged system, had joined the swelling wave of citizens—including colleague Patrice Lumumba—outgrowing their circumscribed roles and visualizing a free nation. As Justin’s unexpected disclosures reveal, breaking from patriarchy is not without great sacrifice, and Kassanda openly wrestles with this troubling dissonance.

Monday February 23 at 7pm
Alain Kassanda in person
Coconut Head Generation
Directed by Alain Kassanda
France/Nigeria 2023, DCP, color, 89 min. English, Yoruba and French with English subtitles

As modestly radical as the people it follows, Kassanda’s feature begins at the “Thursday Film Series,” a cinema club held by students at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Screening works by the likes of Hondo, Sembene and the Black Audio Film Collective, the energized students quickly transcend the title’s dismissive moniker given to them by the older generation and engage in respectfully fierce debates about a range of issues—unemployment, neocolonialism, feminism—spurred by the screenings. Allowing unfolding events guide its content and format, Kassanda adapts to surprising upsets which include the university’s union strike, itself soon swept up in the larger #EndSARS movement denouncing police brutality and government ineptitude, followed shortly by its bloody suppression. Amid challenging conditions, the students respond to systems that continually fail them through non-hierarchical, thoughtful organizing. Kassanda not only documents but participates in bringing cinema to life through compassionate, inspired action.

The Harvard Film Archive and the Film Study Center welcome Alain Kassanda as this year’s McMillan-Stewart Fellowship recipient. In addition to the  screenings at the HFA, including two in-person appearances, Kassanda will be visiting classes, presenting a workshop at the Film Study Center and meeting with other colleagues on campus.

The McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking was established at the Film Study Center in 1997 with a generous gift from Geneviève McMillan in memory of her late friend, Reba Stewart, to support outstanding filmmakers from Africa or the African diaspora. The endowment provides both a fellowship for the laureate, through which they visit Harvard and share their work with the University community, and also for the purchase of a representative example of the fellow’s oeuvre for preservation in the Harvard Film Archive. The McMillan-Stewart Advisory Committee for 2025-26 is comprised of Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou, Dyana Gaye, Haden Guest, Pedro Pimenta, and Joana Pimenta.