NBO film festival is here and with screenings happening in different parts of the city, missing one, and more would be a huge let down.
Kicking off the week with Alliance Française‘s screening of L’AFRANCE directed by Alain Gomis took me through dense internalisation about the duality of the pain in denial, and accepting what is referred as ‘reality’.
Set in Paris, the film centers on El Hadj, a young Senegalese student whose legal residency has come to an end. He is torn between his wish to remain in Paris and his desire to return home and serve his country. Juxtaposing images of El Hadj’s sometimes troubled memory of Africa with the harsh realities of young Africans living a penurious existence in downtown Paris, director Alain Gomis shares with us El Hadj’s torment as he teeters on the brink of suicide.
The juxtaposition of it all had me; the chants of freedom Hadj recites in the shower, and conversations he has with his friends about staying in Paris which he considers not by saying out loud but by the pauses of introspection and the bursts of anger from the denial of it, as masterfully performed by Djolof Mbengue.
The film’s cinematography makes you feel one with the city of Paris as if holding your hand through the bars, museums, and busy streets as Hadj questions his purpose there alongside his processing of the struggle he goes through trying to go home. Once the lens captures Dakar, you feel it, especially the last shot as Hadj decides to take his teaching aspirations back to Paris; the hills, the trees, the quiet pauses in his conversation with his dad at a roof top bringing to view his tranquil home town.
L’AFRANCE is a brilliant piece exploring not only complex human elements but also dissecting what one thinks pan-africanism really is and how the world shapes it sometimes in contrary to our very first perception of it.
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