“A Day with My Father,” by Akinola Davies Jr.
There is this big isolated house in the jungle and these two boys of around ten who are bickering, brothers. There are these close-ups which give as much presence to an ant, to a twig, to the blowing of the wind as to humans. There are these filmed camera movements, a little blurry, which destabilize the gaze. There is this mixture, powerful as a potion, of material presence and instability.
Folarin, the boys’ father, appears in the house. He takes them to where he works, far away, in Lagos. It’s the first time for them. They are overwhelmed by the immensity of the big Nigerian city, the crowds of people, cars and motorbikes. And the military.
Dad knows people, they greet him with a name that his sons Remi and Akin didn’t know. Is he this admired leader, whom men nickname “the lion”? Is he a proscribed rebel? Or rather just a modest worker that the boss doesn’t pay? And these friends, are they really friendly?
There are scary headlines in the newspapers and the excitement of this election day. The story takes place in Nigeria, in 1993. The opposition party is certain to win the national election which has just taken place, the results are expected the same day.
Alongside this usually absent father, the two boys discover a kaleidoscope of relationships, noises, colors, music, behaviors. The film is with them in these very concrete sensations, where tenderness and violence, fear and excitement circulate. They discover an unstable and fragmented world. Alongside the man and the two boys, sometimes close to touching them, the direction of the British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. shares a whole range of emotions and sensations.
It is extremely rare for a first feature film to be capable of deploying such a rich and nuanced palette, sensorial and saturated with tensions, questions and troubles. The tenderness, the dangers, the dreamlike are constantly recomposed in this wonderfully embodied story.
From a funfair to a maquis where adults drink and dance, from a beach like a nightmare to little affectionate games, Folarin, Remi and Akin meet unexpected people and situations, argue, and reconcile. And the soldiers, the look of the soldiers on the street corners, the general on TV.
One day with my fatherwhich it is also interesting to know that it is inspired by what Akinola Davies Jr. really experienced and that it was co-written with his brother Wale Davies, does not need this information to be – sequence after sequence, choice of frame and sound composition, sensitivity to intonations, faces, rhythms – a magnificent film.
Needless to say, we are delighted about this, especially since sub-Saharan Africa, especially its English-speaking part, does not really flood the big screens with memorable productions? And it is even very welcome that this authentic work of cinema concerns a country which, over the last decades, had become under the name of “Nollywood” the emblem of a pseudo alternative to cinema, massively mediocre, complacent, ultra conformist in terms of morals, politics and staging.
Nollywood, born from multiple causes, many of which are linked to the tragic events evoked in Akinola Davies Jr.’s film, has erased the memory of a Nigerian cinema which nevertheless existed. And who finds with One day with my father proof of a possible rebirth.
“The Black Snake”, by Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux
He worked in the city, he left in a hurry. Ciro will arrive just in time to be there, on the miserable farm where he grew up, when his mother dies. The old man alongside the dying woman is hostile to the returning man, as are the villagers. This human hostility seems to redouble the titanic, cosmic hostility of the Colombian desert where this community lives.
Desert? Yes and no. Grilled rocks and canyons, reliefs with strange shapes, landscapes of superhuman splendor and yet inhabited, populated by men and women, animals and plants, multiple, austere forms of life, skilled in taking advantage of everything that allows existence.
The mother, a powerful woman inhabited by knowledge and stories, was an incarnation of this earth. The village community, but also the reptiles of this place called the Tatacoa desert, are other figures. That of a relationship with the world that Ciro, who left to work in the capital Bogota, betrayed.
This immemorial place in the sky from which we see a train of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites pass is not really a desert but “a dry forest”, a spectacular fossil universe inhabited by myths. This is where the old woman should be buried. The black snakes approached. Not very far away, the great astronomy observatory watches, where the gringos who kill the snakes work.
Forces of different natures accompany the journey of the husband and son of the deceased, transported on the back of a donkey, while yet another mysterious power is deployed. None other than the power of cinema, capable of making perceptible the vibrant presence which emanates from these places, these bodies, these fragments of story, such as the production of Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux activates the effects.
After his first feature film set in Mexico, the memorable Towards the battle (2021), the French director changed region in Latin America and tone in the mode of narration. It has also gone from a historical adventure to an immemorial legend which becomes a story of transmission, at the same time as it has gone from a living jungle to a dried-out jungle. But its power of invocation remains intact and makes the encounter with The black snake an impressive experience.
“An Indian youth”, by Neeraj Ghaywan
A strange thing happens to the film and to those who see it. The first part is a smooth and conventional illustration of a very legitimate discourse against the discrimination suffered in India by minorities who together constitute a majority: women, Muslims, people belonging to the inferior caste of Dalits, who were long called the “untouchables”.
The journey of two friends, a Dalit and a Muslim seeking to escape marginality by taking an exam to enter the Indian police, has the flavor of the paradox of wanting to become guardians of an order that oppresses them, a phenomenon that is in reality commonplace, almost everywhere in the world. A love story prevented by injustices and prejudices, endemic corruption and human vileness will stand in the way of the two young men.
But during their journey an event occurs with unexpected effects. Fraudulently deprived of their rights, the two young people became factory workers – an environment so little shown in cinema, let alone by Indian cinema. When the Covid-19 pandemic occurs, the factory closes and everyone is fired without further ado.
Without any resources, the two young people undertake a long odyssey, surrounded by the illness that kills, by hunger, by the prohibitions brutally applied by the authorities, by the fear and aggressiveness of many of those they encounter – not all. The unexpected harshness of the story of this long journey is then reinforced by a singular shift.
Like his first feature film, Masaan (2015), the second film by Indian filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan, belongs to this category of achievements (Slumdog Millionaire, The Lunchbox, Sister Midnight, etc.) which tell stories of misery and survival in the Indian subcontinent, as Western audiences expect and appreciate them. Sentimentalism, miserabilism and exoticism are the main sources.
But now, to the horrible living conditions prevailing in these distant lands, a scourge has been added which affects all continents, including the most affluent regions. We too have experienced Covid-19 and suffered from it. However, the earthquake of the pandemic in a country like India (and in many other parts of the world) constituted a catastrophe out of all proportion to anything that has been experienced in developed countries benefiting from variable, even very unequal, forms of social protection.
The helpless brutality of what tens of millions of Indians, hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings have suffered under the effect of the pandemic, far beyond the massacres directly due to the virus, is of a completely different magnitude than the very real suffering and trauma suffered particularly in Western Europe.
The violence of this additional suffering fundamentally transforms what this film creates, while the two young people undertake a perilous journey to return home, through the country in the grip of a crisis where the word “confinement” takes on a very particular meaning.
The English title, Homeboundsays the journey they are trying to accomplish, but perhaps also what a link with the common home should mean, a link whose pandemic has highlighted in a particularly cruel way how undone it is. “Home” designates their home, but also India and the world.
They and we dealt with the same illness, but we didn’t experience the same thing. This violence, an objective and tragic violence which concerns us, runs during the end of what is presented, in a very curious way, under the title
An Indian youth. As it plays out, in addition to the atrocious brutality of the injustices characteristic of Indian society, that of inequalities between the South and the North, in a very concrete and very underestimated form.
