MEDI1TV Afrique : Hommage à Dalila Ennadre à l'Institut français, Zoom sur Camara Laye et Yeelen de Souleymane Cissé - 16/11/2024
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00:00And it is with great pleasure that we meet you again on Mediain TV for this new Escalculture
00:15at the heart of Africa.
00:17In a few moments, we will immerse ourselves in one of the most beautiful feathers, the
00:22universe of one of the most beautiful African feathers, the Guinean Camara Lae.
00:26We will also talk about cinema, but first of all, let's welcome our guest of the day.
00:38And today, we have the immense pleasure of welcoming Lilia Enader, who is with us.
00:44She is the daughter of the late Dalila Enader, who is in the honor of French institutes
00:51until December 14th.
00:53A very beautiful retrospective of seven of her documentary films.
00:58Hello Lilia.
01:01Hello.
01:03Thank you for being with us, for being here to talk about this very beautiful retrospective,
01:09which will continue until mid-December, in the honor of your mother.
01:15And what does it do to you to be here?
01:17I imagine that it is a lot of emotion, since you are also her daughter.
01:23I think it is rare for people to be so close to her, and who are always close to her.
01:27And that must be a lot of emotion.
01:29What can you tell us about it?
01:32Yes, it is a lot of emotion, but it is also a lot of joy and recognition that it is done
01:38with so much support and that it is done so well.
01:41I really wanted, for the five years of her disappearance, to pay tribute to her through
01:46a retrospective of seven of her documentary films.
01:49And then to start this tour in Morocco, it makes a lot of sense because of her link to her country of origin,
01:54which was really visceral for her.
01:57So I am very, very happy, very happy with this tour.
02:01And it is true that Morocco is omnipresent, or almost, in its filmography.
02:07There has always been this link, and to be close to people, to come back a little,
02:14to live with them, to show them their true face.
02:19And as a girl, but also as a woman, with the hindsight that you can have today
02:27on the filmography of your late mother.
02:30How can you explain the choice of these themes?
02:36What did she tell you about that?
02:38And why this social vein that was so dear to her?
02:41She was one of all the fighters who help to capture a word to do justice.
02:48And so she was a spokeswoman for the Moroccan people.
02:52She had this desire to show what is not easily seen, to give voice to those to whom we do not give the word.
03:01That's what she said.
03:02But she did it with a lot of justice and delicacy, which gave a lot of strength to her films.
03:09And then she was also strong, both in listening and in presence.
03:14So her work was based a lot on the respect of the other.
03:18She devoted her life to defending women's rights, especially in Morocco.
03:23She drew a lot of strong portraits of women to whom we don't often hear about her in her films.
03:34And so, among the films that I chose for the documentary, for this retrospective,
03:40I chose films that are all related to subjects, themes, Moroccan subjects.
03:47Precisely to emphasize her great presence in Morocco with her films.
03:55Lilia, speaking of this tribute, of this retrospective organized by the French Institutes until December 14th,
04:04can you tell us about the choices, the films, the documentaries that you have selected?
04:11I chose seven of these documentaries, which are all related to subjects of Moroccan society.
04:17She dedicated her life to defending women's rights in Morocco,
04:22but also to give voice in her films, all the space of the word to the forgotten of this land, as she called them.
04:29The little people, the prostitutes, the poor.
04:32But above all, her films are of incredible humanity and they show all the wealth of these people who have nothing.
04:40And so I chose films that represent well, I think, everything she wanted to address,
04:46everything she wanted to touch on in her cinema, to defend the oppressed speech of the Moroccan people.
04:54And you, Lilia, as her daughter, I think you must have witnessed the preparation of the filming,
05:03all these researches, this atmosphere, this intellectual, artistic boiling,
05:09this thirst for truth that animates a lot the filmmakers of documentaries in general.
05:16And what are the memories that you have of that and that still animate you today?
05:25I have a very special connection with her last film, Jean Genet, Notre Père des Fleurs,
05:30which is a film that focuses on a reflection on the afterlife.
05:33And it's a film that I had to finish with a collective of filmmakers and film editors
05:40because it left before the end.
05:42And it was very... I finished this film with a lot of emotion,
05:48but with a lot of fascination for her work and the look she had at the end of her life
05:53on the link that can exist between the dead and the living.
05:56So it's a film that still accompanies me today in the process of mourning.
06:01And it was particularly strong to finish her last documentary,
06:06which is a very beautiful film.
06:08I was also very afraid that it didn't look like her.
06:10Because, of course, I spent all my childhood talking to her about her films, her projects,
06:18and this one was really intimately part of our daily life.
06:21So I had this great responsibility that it be her film.
06:24And I was very, very happy to see the final version of the editing,
06:30because I think it's a film that resonates a lot in the hearts
06:34and that is exactly... it's a film... it's my mother's film.
06:39And it's true that I think it could only look like her through you as well.
06:44And you were talking about your mother's look and with hindsight.
06:50How would you sum up your mother's look as a filmmaker's wife?
06:57Not just as a filmmaker, but as a woman.
07:00Because that's also what made her the filmmaker she was.
07:06So I'd like you to sum it up.
07:12In fact, she was everything she portrays in her films.
07:16A woman, a poor orphan, and then she grew up in a social environment
07:21where she lived around her women.
07:23And when she came back to France, she didn't understand
07:27this distorted image that people had of these women with whom she grew up.
07:32So she was keen to reveal this intimacy.
07:36She also had this closeness with people.
07:39People loved her as much and admired her as much for her person as for her work.
07:43And I think that's why she managed to capture an intimacy
07:48that we're not used to seeing,
07:49especially when you're a woman in Morocco.
07:52We don't necessarily talk about all the subjects she tackles in her films.
08:00And she managed to put people in trust and in this desire to share,
08:05to speak up, to access a better world.
08:11And the screening has already begun at the Institut français du Maroc.
08:19What are your first impressions, Lilia?
08:40I'm very excited to see how much these themes speak to everyone
08:45and how much everyone can identify with each other through my mother's films,
08:50especially this one, which speaks of this reflection
08:53on the relationship that the dead can have with the living,
08:56but also the legacy that a dead person can leave in a city,
09:00in this case in the city of La Haleiche.
09:03And to be able to feel how people leave the room
09:07with this desire to see other films by my mother.
09:10It really gives me the strength to continue,
09:12to make her legacy last as long as possible in Morocco.
09:16But also, I find that her films go beyond the borders of Morocco
09:20because they were universal in the way she saw the world.
09:23And that's why her films reach a very wide audience all over the world.
09:30And it's your honour, Lilia, to perpetuate the memory of your mother as a woman,
09:36but also as a filmmaker, through these beautiful retrospectives.
09:39And you, Lilia, didn't all of this give you the desire to testify,
09:44to reveal a certain truth through the camera?
09:52So, the only project I would like to do
09:55would be a biographical film about my mother's life,
09:58because as she spent her life revealing the lives of others,
10:01I want to give her this gift
10:03and to show Alia Inad under a more intimate perspective.
10:08So, that would be the project I have and that I hope to achieve one day,
10:13but it would be the only one.
10:14Otherwise, I'm an actress, so I'm in front of the camera.
10:19But it's a way of participating for me,
10:22rather than continuing this legacy.
10:27In any case, thank you for being with us, Lilia.
10:30It was really a pleasure to receive you
10:33in the retrospective dedicated to Alia Inad.
10:37So, until December 14th,
10:40through Morocco, at the Instituts Français.
10:43And you as a spokeswoman.
10:44Thank you very much, Lilia.
10:56And right away, in Africa,
10:58in Culture au Guiné,
10:59Camara Lahié, who will offer Africa great classics of our literature,
11:04with a first major novel of the French-African corpus,
11:08inspired by Kafkaian.
11:10Le Regard du Roi, a classic of French-African literature,
11:14a symbolic novel and of modernist inspiration,
11:17strongly influenced by, of course, the reading of Kafka.
11:21In any case, the opus appeared in the Plon editions in 1954.
11:25Lahié became famous,
11:26notably by publishing his first autobiographical novel,
11:29L'Enfant Noir, published in 1953.
11:31Then, with Le Regard du Roi,
11:32his second novel, published in the wake of the first one.
11:35This is how Camara Lahié gives the real measure of his talent
11:39with his novel, Pas comme les autres,
11:41based on metaphorical writing.
11:44Le Guinien brings us into a more intimate Africa,
11:47also interiorized,
11:48made of symbols and, above all, of myths.
11:55Considered as one of the founding texts
11:56of contemporary African literature,
11:58this work, largely autobiographical,
12:00published by the Plon publishing house,
12:02won the Charles Veyon Prize in 1954.
12:05We are in Paris, in 1953.
12:10L'Enfant Noir is Camara Lahié's first novel.
12:16The book begins with Lahié's childhood, in the 1930s.
12:19A young boy who lives with his parents in Kourousa,
12:22a village in Haute-Guinée.
12:23His father, the village's blacksmith,
12:25teaches him the techniques of his art in order to succeed him.
12:28Lahié discovers peasantry with his grandmother,
12:31who lives in a neighboring village.
12:33He goes to French school
12:34and, after obtaining his certificate of professional aptitude in Conakry,
12:38Lahié is offered the opportunity to continue his studies in France.
12:41Camara Lahié is 25 years old when he writes this autobiographical story.
12:45His style, direct, alive and alert,
12:47finally an accessible work, whether you are passionate about Africa or not.
12:51It quickly becomes an indispensable classic for those who like literature in general
12:54and this true masterpiece of African French literature
12:57is even studied in schools.
12:59The book was so successful that it won the Charles Veyon Prize in 1954
13:03and was adapted for cinema by director Laurent Chevalier.
13:07Thus, the film L'Enfant Noir, freely adapted from the homonymous novel,
13:11was released in France in 1995.
13:13The book was also adapted into a comic by Camara Onzumana in 2010.
13:28The African literature of the 20th century is characterized by the radical rupture
13:33that the author reveals here.
13:36In particular, with his own style, in his first novel, L'Enfant Noir,
13:40for example, that some have advanced at the time,
13:42the thesis that the novel in question would have been written by a white author
13:46without any concrete proof being provided.
13:49In any case, the king's gaze tells, in an allegorical and parodic way,
13:52the adventures of a European
13:54who is engaged on the great roads of Africa in an initiatory quest.
13:59And for historian and literary critic Boniface Mungo Boussa,
14:02it is the choice of the European protagonist,
14:05under the pen of an African author, that poses a problem.
14:08I quote for the first time,
14:09by staging a white man in a very disobliging position
14:13and it is one of the reasons why this book bothers.
14:16Let's listen right now.
14:19Guinea, the first African country to emancipate itself from colonial France,
14:22obtained its independence in 1958 and Ahmed Sekou Touré is elected president.
14:27Kamara Lai is the first ambassador of his country to Ghana.
14:29He then occupies various posts outside Ghana before returning to Conakry,
14:34where he works for the Department of Economic Agreements,
14:36then as director of the National Institute for Research and Documentation.
14:40Kamara Lai is more and more often in conflict
14:42with the policies of the regime of President Ahmed Sekou Touré
14:45and he is imprisoned before fleeing with his family in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1960s,
14:49before settling in Senegal,
14:50where he works for the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa, IFAN,
14:53a research institute based in Dakar
14:55and which succeeded the French Institute of Black Africa.
14:58His book is timeless.
14:59In this same register, we find the book
15:01Amkoulel, the Peuple Child, by Amadou Mbathéba,
15:04published in 1991, which speaks to him of his childhood in Mali.
15:07Kamara Lai's last book, The Master of Speech, published in 1978,
15:12is a transcription of the epic of Sundiata,
15:14an oral epic dedicated to Sundiata Keïta, the Moedeng emperor, who died in 1255.
15:20Kamara Abdou Lai died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar.
15:27It must be said that director Laurent Chevalier
15:29will also make a film, a cinematographic adaptation of The People Child,
15:34the young snowman, to do his studies across all of Guinea,
15:37to go to Conakry.
15:39He is then caught in the spiral of urban life
15:42and receives the modern world and its violence.
15:45Another life then begins, a true initiatory story.
15:48This film is a story of exile,
15:50one that every man who separates himself from his childhood
15:53in a cinematographic tribute to Kamara Lai,
15:56that we look at right now.
15:58The characters are a bit special in this film
16:00because they are not professional actors.
16:02They are characters that I met there, on the spot, in Guinea.
16:06And it turns out that The People Child is the adaptation of a novel
16:10written by a Guinean writer named Kamara Lai,
16:13who has died now for a while
16:15and who wrote his childhood memories.
16:18His childhood memories take place in Kourousa,
16:20a village in the highlands of Guinea.
16:22And when I went to Kourousa to explain the project,
16:25the idea of adapting the book to the cinema,
16:28I ended up meeting his own family,
16:30because there are always six brothers who live there,
16:33who are mechanics, educators, peasants, taxi drivers,
16:37very simple people.
16:39And when I explained the project,
16:41they made me understand, with a lot of insistence,
16:43that it was their story,
16:45the story of the People Child.
16:47Even if I didn't want to reconstruct the book,
16:49because the film is not a historical reenactment,
16:51the book was written in 1953,
16:53so it's the Guinea of the 1920s or 1930s,
16:55it's been almost a century.
16:57And so I had to put everyone back in their period costumes,
17:01I had to remove the television antennas.
17:03It's a complicated cinema,
17:05which requires a lot of resources.
17:07And I proposed to them to do a much simpler adaptation,
17:09a contemporary adaptation,
17:11that is, to take the same story,
17:14which is the story of a child
17:16whose father decides to send his child to the city
17:18to study and later become the support of the family.
17:20It's a story of exile,
17:22the exile experienced by a child
17:24who leaves his village and discovers the big city of Conakry,
17:26the capital of Guinea.
17:33And right away in Afrikaan culture,
17:35we are talking about cinema,
17:37with Suleiman Sisé,
17:39who gave us his first films,
17:41with which he exploited the difficulties of Mali
17:43to become modern.
17:45Moreover, his first medium-length film,
17:475 Days of a Life, released in 1971,
17:49takes on the theme of the misadventures
17:51of a young peasant in pursuit of the laws of the city.
17:53His first feature film,
17:55for him, Den Muzo, a young girl in 1975,
17:57poses the problem of ephemerality
17:59and male power.
18:01In any case, this subject is worth
18:03three years of prohibition.
18:05Finally, Bara, the work, released in 1978,
18:07addresses the world of work and industry
18:09from the angle of the conflict
18:11between workers and bosses.
18:13Then, in 1978, with Yelen,
18:15this splendid epic and poetic tale,
18:17Suleiman Sisé,
18:19asserts his legitimacy as a pioneer.
18:21After 40 years of career
18:23and 7 feature films,
18:25he became one of the masters of cinema
18:27on our continent.
18:29Let's watch our film of the day,
18:31Yelen extracts the trailer.
18:41Yelen extracts the trailer.
19:11Yelen extracts the trailer.
19:41Yelen extracts the trailer.
20:11Yelen extracts the trailer.
20:13Yelen extracts the trailer.
20:41Yelen extracts the trailer.
20:48Yelen de Suleiman Sisé,
20:50who traces an initiatory journey,
20:52a once-jaded moment between childhood
20:54and adulthood, the hero, just a young man,
20:56will receive the wisdom destined
20:58to ensure him the mastery
21:00of the forces around him.
21:02This knowledge Bara has inherited
21:04for generations and generations.
21:06In any case, the father can not stand
21:08to see his son become his equal
21:10To escape his murderous madness, the mother drives the young man away.
21:14Well, Nyan Koro, following the journey, will eventually acquire, little by little,
21:18the elements of ultimate knowledge of his new powers,
21:22which he will inevitably have to confront with those of his father.
21:26Yelen is a timeless film.
21:27It was the first African film to be printed in international competition in Cannes.
21:32Finally, Sissé wonders what light is,
21:35and Sissé responds in his own way.
21:37the fact of telling the great myths of humanity with a new light.
21:41He says, the final sun of Yelen represents everything.
21:44He gets up on a desert,
21:45haunted by a woman and a child after the trauma, the cataclysm, the apocalypse.
21:50The world starts again, reborn in its ashes,
21:53with calm and the golden light of the landscapes.
21:56The light allows, well, the miracle,
21:58the miracle of life, of this new birth of the world.
22:02This new light, which provides the sweet clarity of a renaissance sun,
22:06which warms the beings and makes them hope for life.
22:09In any case, Yelen is the film of this miracle.
22:12Rather than a miracle, too much can be marked by the Judeo-Christian culture.
22:16It would be better to say magic, or rather magic of time,
22:20of the world, Bambara par excellence,
22:22and of witchcraft in Yelen's staging.
22:25Sissé respects the ancient tradition with, and a little, and he Africanizes it.
22:31He starts with the opening tension, the most beautiful scene of Yelen,
22:35the most touching, serves as a traitor in the path of the hero with his relationship with his mother.
22:41There, we have a sequence where the characters are struck by fear,
22:44aware of their tragic dimension, and do not dare to look at each other.
22:48And this is where the opening of the film takes place.
22:50It is the simplicity of the words that strike,
22:52words marked by the deepest meaning.
22:56You have to run away from a terrible father,
22:58but said in the beauty of the Barbara language.
23:02So, Yelen, a film to see urgently,
23:05a real contemporary tale, and above all, timeless.
23:16And before we leave in Africa, in culture,
23:20the agenda came out with the festival dedicated to African cinema,
23:27at the heart of Berne for this 29th edition,
23:32very promising, no less than six African films,
23:36which are therefore selected,
23:39with, in particular, the film of Esme El Moudir,
23:43The Mother of All Lies,
23:45Les Filles d'Olfa,
23:46or the film dedicated to the South African diva,
23:51Césaria Evora,
23:52which will also be in competition.
23:56Also, Samy Balouji,
23:58which will be on display.
24:00A dense and concentrated programming,
24:03not to be missed.
24:05So, in Berne, if you happen to be there,
24:08this is the meeting of African cinema,
24:12which is once again in the spotlight.
24:14And we come to the end of Africa in culture.
24:16Thank you for being with us.
24:18It's always a pleasure to meet you on Médien TV.
24:21And then we'll meet again next week,
24:23without fail.
24:23Until then, take care.