2023-07-05 02:05:00
The Guinean Thierno Souleymane Diallo surveys his country in search of a missing relic: the very first film made in 1953 by a French-speaking black African.
The stories of lost films have all the mystery and romance needed to turn into legends. The case of Mouramani is no exception, the first feature film directed by a French-speaking black African under colonization, registered in the registers but disappeared from the radar after its release in 1953. Posterity has not completely erased the name of its author, the Guinean Mamadou Touré, pioneer of an untraceable work. Who to follow in his footsteps? A young documentary filmmaker of today named Thierno Souleymane Diallo, who signs, with the cemetery of the film, an investigation with holes, in pursuit of this missing relic. You might as well call him a detective.
Shot between the streets of Conakry and Paris (to the premises of the associative cinema La Clef), the film takes the form of an impossible spinning. The sleuth turns to the elders, questions the experts and the students. Did they ever lay eyes on this ghost film, which brought Guinea onto the big cinema stage? In the foreground, the story is one of a transmission failure. The lack left by the disappearance of this heritage for a young filmmaker as an orphan of a father, deprived of the founding legacy from which to trace his path. Behind the hunt for the work, whose progress doomed to failure looks very much like a pretext, there is therefore a story bigger than itself. That of a field of ruins where Guinea, a country without archives, historically had to see its cinema die, gone to ashes after the Portuguese invasion of 1970 and the purge of image makers.
On a related subject, we think of Talking About Trees by the Sudanese Suhaib Gasmelbari, or the novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr la plus secrete Mémoire des hommes. The last moments of the film show the director in the middle of a happening in the streets of Paris, slipped into a sandwich-man outfit and beating the publicity for this film that onlookers will never be able to see. It is therefore that it will have to be invented. The wanted poster remaining unanswered, the next scene will find him in the middle of a fake filming of the work found by the imagination. A remake without a model, a copy with which to fictitiously summon the invisible object. Under the ashes, the images are still moving.
At the film cemetery of Thierno Souleymane Diallo, 1 h 30.
#cemetery #film #search #lost #reel #Liberation