Bassek Ba Kobhio


Bassek Ba Kobhio is a Cameroonian filmmaker and writer.

Life

Bassek Ba Kobhio was born in 1957 in Ninje. He started as a writer, winning a short story award while still at high school in 1976.
Kobhio's first feature film, Sango Malo was an auto-adaptation of his earlier novel. The film portrayed a new village school teacher whose indifference to traditional customs causes conflict with the school's headmaster and disrupts village life. His second film, Le grand blanc de Lambaréné, brought out the complexities of character of Albert Schweitzer. Despite clear differences of setting and subject matter, both films "offer vivid portraits of flawed idealists who wish to do good, but are authoritarian, puritanical, at odds with their surroundings and neglectful towards their womenfolk".
In 1997 he founded the film festival Écrans Noirs.
In 2003 he collaborated with Didier Ouénangaré on The Silence of the Forest, an adaptation of a novel by Étienne Goyémidé.

Works

Films