2023-05-16 17:54:07
Six young African or diaspora filmmakers are on the bill at the 76e edition of the Cannes Film Festival, including two in the running for the Palme d’Or (Rama-Toulaye Sy and Kaouther Ben Hania) and four in the “Un certain regard” selection (Asmae El Moudir, Mohamed Kordofani, Kamal Lazraq and Baloji). “The question that concerns them is no longer that of the construction of Africa in the followingmath of independence, as in the time of Sembène Ousmane [réalisateur sénégalais et pionnier du cinéma en Afrique avec son film Borrom Sarret en 1963], but well: how to inhabit the world today? », emphasizes Olivier Barlet, researcher and connoisseur of African cinema.
Ramata-Toulaye Sy, for Banel & Adams
The Franco-Senegalese Ramata-Toulaye Sy is the only director of the competition selected for a first feature film. Trained as a screenwriter, graduated from the National School of Image and Sound Professions (Fémis, in Paris), she shot her first short film, Thistle, in 2021 in Fouta-Toro, where his two parents were born, fifteen minutes by canoe from Mauritania. It is in this region of northern Senegal that also takes place Banel & Adamsa crazy love story between two young people.
“It’s a closed doorexplain to Monde Ramata-Toulaye Sy. I wanted to write a tragedy, a Romeo and Juliet African, I dreamed of filming the most beautiful love story on the continent. » A passion without a cell phone or electricity, where the female character, “already emancipated, radical and passionate, tilts the film into modernity”. “My film is far from naturalist films, it’s magical realism “says the 36-year-old director who grew up in the Paris regione. “I am very proud to represent Africa at Cannes, she adds, and I’m happy that there are so many of us this year. But we shouldn’t have to count African filmmakers, that should be the norm. »
Kaouther Ben Hania, for Olfa’s Daughters
More familiar with the festival, Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania already has several award-winning films to her credit: Beauty and the Pack, presented in 2017 at Cannes in the category “Un certain regard”, and The Man Who Sold His Skinselected in the “Orizzonti” section of the Venice Film Festival in 2020. Since his first feature film, The Challat of Tunis, in 2014, the filmmaker, trained at the School of Arts and Cinema in Tunis and at La Fémis, likes to confuse the issue, play with the codes of fiction and documentary; “two kinds, she sayswho dialogue well”. In the running for the Palme d’Or, Daughters of Olfa, her fifth feature film, retraces ten years of the life of a woman from a modest background whose two daughters joined the Islamic State (IS) in Libya in 2014.
Asmae El Moudir, pour The mother of all lies
This quest for a language on the edge of fiction and documentary also animates the Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir, 32 years old. “I always start from a photo to tell my stories”, tells the young woman, who explores in The mother of all lies the unspoken family and the bread riots of 1981 in Casablanca. In the absence of archive images, the director, also a graduate of La Fémis following studying in Morocco, makes figurines dialogue with the living and creates her own archives by filming in a workshop – a space where “speech can be freed without putting anyone in danger”.
Mohamed Kordofani, for Goodbye Julia
Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani, 40, is also plagued by questions of form. Selected in the category “Un certain regard”, his first feature film, Goodbye Julia, tells the story of two young women, one in the south, the other in the north of Sudan. “It’s not a political film for all that”, he explains, he who was in post-production in Beirut when war broke out in Khartoum. « The filming was very difficult, often interrupted by tear gas,” explains the director, reached by telephone in Dubai. “Without the passion of the whole team – most of the technicians were under 25 – this film would not have seen the light of day”he says.
Kamal Lazraq, pour The Packs
Born in Casablanca in 1984, director Kamal Lazraq presented his first film at Cannes. The Packs follows Hassan and his son Issam, who live off petty trafficking in the working-class neighborhoods of the Moroccan economic capital. Graduated from the Fémis – also – in 2011, the director was already exploring the urban margins in his short film Moul Lkelb (The Man with a Dog).
Baloji, for “Augury”
Baloji, born in 1978 in Lumumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), lives in Belgium and is like a UFO in this landscape of young filmmakers trained in the best schools. Self-taught without constantly failing in commissions, he began in 2018 to produce his short films, « hybrid, dreamlike”, before directing his first feature filmAugur, “a choral film on witchcraft in a phantasmagorical Africa”. Also summoning the magic realism »the musician, poet, stylist and director is delighted to be in Cannes: “It’s fabulous, because it gives legitimacy to this kind of proposal. »
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