THE URGENCY OF FILMING:

AN INTERVIEW WITH FANTA RÉGINA NACRO

In Paris to promote her first feature film, The Night of Truth, the internationally acclaimed Burkinabe director Fanta Régina Nacro, responded to our questions. [Critikat.com]

This film is dedicated to the the memory of your uncle, tortured to death under atrocious circumstances.  Would you have taken on this subject if you hadn’t been directly confronted by these horrors?

Yes, I think so, because my uncle died long before I had the idea of making this film; its story came to me from watching the news.  It was during the war in Yugoslavia, the testimony of women who’d been raped, and right after the rape, acid had been put into their vaginas.  They had seen their husbands killed, their children killed.  I began to truly reflect on these atrocities; I didn’t understand how one could take a malicious pleasure in seeing the suffering of another, especially someone with whom one might perhaps have shared a meal or a drink. It’s not as if this was a person unknown to them.  It’s like during World War I, if a French soldier saw a German soldier and didn’t fire at him, it’s the German who would shoot.  Following the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath, I started thinking again about the way my uncle died.  His death was almost legitimized by the fact that he was a soldier and so he could die from one day to the next.  But it was the manner of his death that spoke to me, not the fact that he died.  One night some other soldiers built a fire and roasted him to death without anyone exactly knowing why.

Let’s speak of the way that you present the violence in your film; you say that you showed it without indulging in it, that’s the least that one could say.  Why did you want to show it at all?

So that people would have the strength to look at it and react to it.  It was a time when plenty of conflicts were going on.  I had the feeling, for example, regarding what was going on in Israel, we’d always hear on the radio or on TV that a suicide bomber had blown up a bus, they’d show us some survivors, sometimes we’d see the bus that had exploded, but they don’t really show us what happened to the people who were inside.  We see it from a distance, as if it were cinema.  Whereas I believe that even if it’s very violent and we are shown mutilated bodies and feel like vomiting, we’ll react and be in a position to question the politicians, to seek a change in the course of things.

There you’re talking about the journalistic treatment of conflicts . . .

Today, there’s not really a clear boundary between journalism and cinema because films are greatly nourished by journalistic elements and vice versa, both in content and in style.  As for me, my starting point is the way a subject is handled: The Night of Truth is a fiction film inspired by elements of the documentary—the boundary is very thin.

That boundary is becoming increasingly less clear.  We could see that in a number of films at the last FESPACO [the Pan-African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina

Faso, one of the world’s most important venues for new African Film] . . .

Even in the landscape of world cinema, wars have always inspired filmmakers: all the Vietnam War films like Apocalypse Now, the war in Afghanistan, and more recently Hotel Rwanda . . . When you’re a director, at any given moment, the fictional images that come to you are necessarily inspired by what surrounds you.  I don’t invent anything; I’m there, I look around me.  Perhaps I’m in the middle of talking to you and there’s something about your attitude that strikes me, that I hold on to, and that I want to do something with.  Wherever I am, I open my eyes and my ears wide, and at any given moment there’s something that calls out to me, that becomes urgent, and if I don’t do something with it, I can no longer live.

Did you have any desire to be a journalist?

Right now, I do somewhat want to do investigative reporting, not documentary pure and simple, but to go looking, searching, taking risks, and showing things that haven’t been shown.  I’d like to be a journalist somewhat along the lines of the show Monday Investigation.  Incidentally, I’ve recruited three young women studying Communications in Ouagadougou who are in the process of preparing investigations on burning issues: we are going to create a series on social topics, on health, on prostitutes, cemeteries, sterilization.  At first for television in Burkina Faso, while hoping that if these subjects take on a universal dimension, they’ll be proposed for TV screens elsewhere in Africa or in Europe. 

Let’s go back to the staging of Night of Truth.  It takes on aspects of classical tragedy…

We were very much inspired by Shakespeare, my co-writer and I.  We asked ourselves how we could tell the story of the post-war period, while giving the necessary information—what had happened and what might still happen.  The first part of the film is very slow, that’s part of the staging of it, and for us this slowness in the dramatic evolution is very important because it symbolizes the collective conscience.  Often in wartime you don’t see things, they’re being hatched without your realizing it, and then suddenly one day they burst into flame and you ask yourself how is this possible?  Who brought the wood, who brought the lighter fluid, who brought the charcoal?  The film title asks, what is the exact instant that a little nothing can unleash things?  What is the moment of truth where one looks at oneself, whether one is a torturer or a nice person, and one has shame for what one is?  Because often, what one shows to someone else is theatre; in this theatricality of life, it’s a question of putting your finger on an instant of truth.  With the risk that that might be a little too theatrical…

You’ve given a very symbolic dimension to the characters…

Once again you ask yourself how a woman who finds herself again before her torturer will react, and how a torturer who wants to live despite his torments will react if he finds himself once again before her.  I am thus part of this instant of truth that everyone must have in one’s life in order to reposition oneself and restart oneself on a new footing, and then the woman’s face looms up.  You ask yourself what point of view you’re going to use to tell this story, who the principal character is.  And then you tell yourself, no, you don’t really want to tell the story of a person, you want to talk about the fragility of peace, and thus the principal character is peace itself.

You’ve always worked in a comic mode before this film…

I don’t lock myself into a genre; it’s the subject that leads to the choice of a genre.  When doing things with AIDS, I chose humor as a way to get the message across.  I’m always questioning myself when I’m preparing a subject; for the theme of AIDS, I watched lots of news items, very, very tough things, before the drug cocktails appeared, and I surprised myself by stopping my ruminations.  Because it was so tough that after the film I had to chase away these dark thoughts in order to live and to sleep peacefully.  I told myself that I couldn’t work this way, because it was putting the brakes on reflection, whereas I wanted the audience to pursue it in order to find a way to struggle.  For this film, I really wanted to say stop, look at what is going on around you, and see what you can do to make a better world possible.  Often in these conflicts, we leave everything up to the authorities, the politicians, the intellectuals.  You’ve got to do personal work and not just obey abstract concepts, even if it is important that there be political reflection.

This was the first film on this kind of subject by an African woman; what were the reactions among your circle?

In my professional circle, people said to me, “It’s a difficult subject.  This is your first feature film, you should put it aside and go back to it after you’ve made two or three other features.  Try your hand at simpler things…”  But I work under a sense of urgency, and I know that if I don’t make this one, I will be incapable of doing another.  Within my personal circle, on the other hand, I received encouragement.  I’ve always had a way of taking on subjects that weren’t really conventional!  People knew that I wouldn’t be coming up with clichés.

Do you think you’ve brought a woman’s touch to this film?

I’m not sure that every woman would have approached the script in the same way.  But there are things that correspond more to me, that I can better feel and translate better than a man would: for example, Edna’s suffering, or Soumari’s feelings—I recognize myself in the act of sublimating, moving forward, not being stopped by obstacles.  Theo’s torments were more difficult for me.  So yes, there must have been a feminine touch.

Do you have the sense that the film profession, in Africa, is a macho thing?

When you first come to this craft, whether you’re a man or a woman, you do feel a certain machismo quality.  You’ve got to find your place, and when you’ve understood that, you’ve arrived. 

And in Western filmmaking?

When I speak about my filmmaking problems with French or American colleagues, I realize that we have the same battle, but not the same weaponry.  We don’t have the means, and we’re obliged to invent new economic forms in order to exist, hence the importance of digital.  But it’s not just a question of aesthetics, you’ve got to be demanding on yourself and on your craft, whether you use a professional camera or a home video recorder.  To the extent that we desire to express ourselves, we mustn’t allow the tools to hamper us.  It’s the subject that determines the genre and the format, and after that, in line with the budget that I have, I adapt myself.

Interview by Sarah Elkaïm for Critikat.com.

http://www.critikat.com/article.php3?id_article=186

Translated by Michael Dembrow

 

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