2023 Docmonde Docmonde
The Docmonde programme brings together films developed and written during residences organised by the association of the same name in different parts of the world. The three films showed this year come from Georgia, Burkina Faso and Guinea. The stories told apparently have nothing in common, but their styles have a striking similarity: the filmmakers question the memory of territories and their populations from which they themselves come. By adopting a style of scenario in the first person, they put themselves in the position of investigators, looking for traces of the past little explored and which still resonate today through their individual stories. It is as an actor or actress of their inquiries, by shifting their vision and their audition that they attempt to situate themselves as active witnesses of a memory which has been mishandled, rewritten or forgotten.
Anna Dziapshipa’s medium length film Self-Portrait Along the Borderline – a title borrowed from a famous painting by Frida Kahlo – opens with a shot of the Soukhoumi train station in the capital of Abkhazia, formerly a territory of Georgia which seceded in 1992 following an armed conflict. Back again in this territory, from which her paternal family comes and that she hasn’t seen in twenty-three years, she questions the meaning of the image she is capturing with her camera. How to find the response to these questions in her images? Anna Dziapshipa starts off on an inquiry into archive images, those of the family and of the nation, to understand how her typically Abkhazian family name – formerly tied to the accomplishments of her grand-father football player – has crystallised for nearly three decades a persistent fracture between two territories. From this enquiry aimed at understanding the evolution of her identity, emerges an autobiographical and personal story that is cleverly woven together with political history.
In his film Au cimetière de la pellicule, the talented filmmaker Thierno Souleymane Diallo starts out on a picaresque adventure. Lacking both memory and archives, the filmmaker creates his images in an investigation that starts from Guinea and leads to France. As a young filmmaker, Thierno begins looking for what was perhaps the first film made by a black francophone African, a short fiction film entitled Mouramani, shot in 1953 in his country, Guinea. Camera in hand, boom and mike sticking out of his backpack, he follows the thread of this lost film that nobody seems to have seen, going from one abandoned cinema to another, digging through the national archives destroyed by the military regime in the seventies, to the famous panafrican film studios that were quickly deserted and whose cameras were melted down into pots. Thierno Souleymane Diallo, the main protagonist of his film in which he uses his own body to become a billboard carrier or newspaper vendor in Paris, questions a history of cinema mauled by the economic and political mutations of his country since the period of independence, dusting off memories and attempting to understand what has become of images today in Guinea.
Finally, the Burkinabe filmmaker Wabinlé Nabié kicks off with a similar approach as he works his way through an enquiry made up of oral history, on the traces of a history visible on the bodies and objects of certain ethnic groups in Burkina Faso. Starting from his home village of Fafo, the director tries to understand the history of a tradition destined to disappear in a near future, and captures the words of those who have lived it. This story is that of an entire people, visible on their bodies through the practice of scarification, creating a true identity card used to distinguish the ethnic groups, families or communities of the region. Scarification is today forbidden, so the scars are now worn by a final generation to which the filmmaker belongs. Equipped with a still camera, he questions his community to understand exactly how and why these marks were worn during centuries, and in this way preserves a memory which will be transmitted to his children in another form: at once a mask showing the traditional scars of his ethnic group, but also a film, written by himself and his community, the final witnesses of a memory whose medium continues to evolve.
Along these two screenings, the filmmakers will have the opportunity to question their place as authors and filmmakers within this exploration of memory.
Aurélien Marsais
Screenings hosted by Aurélien Marsais.
In the presence of the filmmakers.