France / Spain

Luis Marquès is a Spanish actor and filmmaker born in France in 1966. He grew up in South America and has been living in West Africa since the beginning of the 1990s. He studied literature, art and communication at the Sorbonne as well as film, theatre and anthropology at the Institut d'Etudes Théâtrales in Paris. During his studies he became friends with Claude Gnakouri from Ivory Coast. They both looked for new, politically more relevant theatre forms and moved to Abidjan, where they founded the street theatre company Yamko Téatri in 1992. They were invited to perform in Mali, Burkina Faso, Paris, Berlin, South Korea and New Caledonia. Back in Ivory Coast they supported campaigns against AIDS and malaria as well as for alphabetization with their plays. In 1998 and 2000 they produced a series of short films: Six Tales of Whites in Africa. Invited by FilmInitiativ, Luis Marquès presented these short films for the first time in Cologne at the film festival Out of Europe VII in 2002. The civil war in Ivory Coast forced Luis Marquès to emigrate with his family to Burkina Faso where he now works as an actor for film, theatre and TV in Ouagadougou. His most recent role is in the new film Soleils (2013) by Dani Kouyaté and Oliver Delahaye. In 2019, Luis Marques was a member of the jury who also oversaw a project to make two films in 24 hours at the 2nd edition of the Bushman Film Festival, the first Francophone film festival in West Africa focused on smart-phone filming, in Abidjan.

Filmography

Three Fables For Use By Whites in Africa (1998)
Trois fables africaines (2000)