Andana Films Picks Up ‘Al Djanat – The Original Paradise,’ About Family in Conflict in Burkina Faso (EXCLUSIVE)
25.04.2023 - 16:45
/ variety.com
Trinidad Barleycorn International sales company Andana Films has boarded “Al Djanat – The Original Paradise” by Franco-Burkinabe director Chloé Aïcha Boro. The film had its international premiere at Visions du Réel, in Nyon, Switzerland, after a world premiere at Fespaco in February. Selected in the international competition in Nyon, the documentary was pre-sold to Canal+ International for a broadcast on the African continent. For her fourth documentary, produced by Les Films de l’œil Sauvage, Boro has, for the first time, turned the camera on her own family, capturing life in their big courtyard surrounded by several small houses in Dédougou, Burkina Faso, where she grew up before emigrating to France. Filmed up close, over a period of five years, the animated square makes the viewer feel as welcome as at home.
The beating heart of the large Coulibaly family, it is also there that all its members’ umbilical cords are buried, binding them, according to the ancestral tradition, forever to the courtyard. Through the years, it also became for the inhabitants a place for prayer and pilgrimage due to its owner, the director’s uncle, Ousmane Coulibaly, a great religious authority. The film, an 84-minute gem of sincerity, has been the documentarist’s most difficult project: “Returning to where my umbilical cord is buried always ties knots in my stomach,” she says in the voice-over. “This return is more of an ordeal than the others. Twelve years of exile in France have taught me that returning is often more difficult than leaving.” An ordeal, because her childhood “original paradise” has become the scene of a family dispute over the legacy of Ousmane Coulibaly, after he died in a stampede during his pilgrimage to Mecca. Who
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