2021 Docmonde Docmonde
The films from this selection were finished recently, but they have been on the mind of their authors for several years. They participated in the writing residencies organised by the Docmonde association in 2018, 2017, or even further back for some, in 2014, 2012… Yet if we look at the films together, we see that they are linked by an invisible thread that deals with family. Family in all its forms. Whether it be of blood, cultures and traditions, or the family that can be a community chosen and built over time. While the world is going through an unprecedented health crisis, while borders are closed and movements limited, while assemblies and gatherings are forbidden, while the fear of the other and the withdrawal into one’s own community seem to dictate our social relationships, this theme can be seen as emblematic.
A question of chance, then! As if this new generation of filmmakers, permeated by the world surrounding them, had naturally oriented and re-evaluated their approach in resonance with the moment in which their films were being completed.
This is even more astonishing in that the directors of the films in this selection comme from all over the planet: from Armenia, Benin, Burkina Faso, the Cameroon, Reunion Island, the Philippines. Again this year, the Docmonde programme presents a state of the world. And it is natural that this theme has appeared as a guiding thread connecting the films. The authors’ perspective, marked by the power of their viewpoint and the forms they have invented and renewed, has as a result that it is not a simple conjugation of a theme that one observes, but truly the emergence of films that simply speak about the world of today and the ways in which people inhabit it.
Seven films have been chosen. They explore our ways of belonging to a family, a group: the ties that one makes to be able to confront difficulties, the shared rituals that punctuate life, the power of transmission from one generation to another, the mental construct of belonging to a country…
Another thing that also links these films is intrinsic to documentary creation. The space where the film is made becomes the place where the relation between the people filming and filmed is created. This concrete relationship that exists all along the shoot also guides ideas throughout the production process. In these films, this relation finally appears in very different ways, but always with great power.
In the Philippines or in Burkina Faso, the communities of women of the night, sex workers filmed by Pabelle Manikan (Dreaming in the Red Light) and Moumouni Sanou (Night Nursery), are recounted in immersion, in their daily life and intimacy. The two filmmakers capture from within the strength that exudes from the help and support they give each other facing the adversity of their precarious situations, but also the complexity of the inevitable reproduction of a family model…
Whether it be the burial of an elder in Mort et Cash, which shows the backstage goings on at a funeral ceremony in Benin, or the lets-pretends that mark a marriage proposal in La Promesse du bagne to re-establish the protocol that wasn’t strictly followed at the beginning of the romance between Adèle and Détyr, rituals punctuate family life. These two films dealing with tradition show a little theatre of life for which the filmmakers simply construct a space.
Erika Etangsalé films her father caught between two cultures, that of Reunion Island, his birthplace, and that of a worker’s life in a town in continental France. In In the Billowing Night, she composes a form reflecting his identity, fragmented by the colonial oppression of French migration policy from the sixties to the eighties. Whereas Mamounata Nikièma accompanies Omar in his perpetual North-South odyssey (Omar’s Odyssey) to relate the complexity of his attachment to his country of origin and the construction of his own identity, straddling such different cultures.
Hakob Melkonyan, despite being distant and respectful in the way he shares the daily life of the Armenian family he follows in Blockade, immediately situates himself in the opening scene of the film. While shots are heard during a gardening session, the filmmaker crouches in the grass with the family, hoping to escape flying bullets… By making this film, he earns his place among them.
Together, during the four sessions of this programme, we will exchange with the filmmakers at Lussas or via videoconference, to evoke that particular place of the filmmaker, a go-between the family microcosm and the public.
Madeline Robert
Screenings hosted by Madeline Robert.