Simon Panay’s documentary is short and its subject tough: in Burkina Faso, 13-year-old Opio works in the Perkoa gold mine but, to earn the money he would need to go back to school, he must decide if he takes the risk of descending into the underground galleries, several hundred meters underground. First feature film by the director, winner of a Lagardère grant (there is always a slight suspicion to see appearing in the credits of such “committed” projects these industrial groups whose agenda is not really militant ), If you’re a man owes a lot to the charisma of its main character, a mute and determined teenager whose face will only show its childlike expression once, when, paradoxically, he must show courage because he is sinking underground. : to overcome fear, alone with the small camera harnessed to him, he begins to hum and make grimaces like a toddler. The underground images are moreover the most striking, the director having taken the decision to go down with Opio in the mine, where the fatal collapses are numerous. For the rest, the documentary adopts a fairly conventional form, scope format, dramatization of Opio’s dilemma, and the lack of certain scenes (including the one where Opio’s father asks him to find the money for his schooling, replaced by a cartoon) implicitly denounces a certain superficiality of the project, a little too eager to tell a story and find meaning in what has none.
“If you are a man”, superficial mine – Liberation
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Trajectory of a charismatic teenager working in a gold mine in Burkina Faso, the documentary sins by its agreed form.