Cameroon / 1999 / 61mins / Documentary / French

CHIEF! asks us to see beyond the cult of personality created by the dictator, allowing us to that a dictatorship is also a system with a logic, a vast machinery of corruption and irresponsibility, a state of mind that pervades an entire population. In every town, office, police station, institution we find autocratic chiefs ruling over their fiefdoms, extorting from their subordinates. CHIEF! examines how the authoritarian model is replicated from top to bottom, transforming all social exchanges into relationships of power and inequality.

Jean-Marie Téno

Jean-Marie Téno, Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker, has been producing and directing films on the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa for over twenty years. Films by Jean-Marie have been honored at festivals worldwide. He has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence and has lectured at many universities. Jean-Marie was born in 1954 in Bandjoun, Cameroon. He studied audiovisual communication at the University of Valenciennes and worked as a film critic for Bwana Magazine and as editor-in-chief at France 3. In 1983, he directed his first short documentary Schubbah. In 1992, he made his documentary Africa, I Will Pluck You Clean on the effects of colonialism and neocolonialism in Cameroon. In 1996, he made Clando, which won the Audience Award at the 6th African Film Festival in Milan, Italy. Jean-Marie Teno is also a producer of his own films with Les Films du Raphia. From 2007 - 2008, he was a Visiting Artist at Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, and in 2009 - 2010 he was visiting Professor at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. He lives between France, Cameroon and the United States. Learn More