ANDREW WORSDALE visited the famous African film director Idrissa Ouedraogo
EMINENT film director Idrissa Ouedraogo, born in Burkina Faso and based in Paris, is currently in the sixth week of shooting his first English-language film in Zimbabwe’s Domboshawa, a rustic area outside Harare. Domboshawa has duly been dubbed “Dombowood”, location for several of the recent batch of Zimbabwean features. It provides huge boulder-like hills and plenty of open space, and it’s only an hour’s drive from the capital.
His film is titled Through The Day. Noe Productions (which also produced the director’s stunning short film about Aids, Afrique Mon Afrique starring Ismael Lo), the UK’s Polar Four, Ouedraogo’s own Les Films De la Plaine and Framework International, a particularly prolific Zimbabwean production company involved in much of the resurgence of feature film production in the country, are all co-producers in the project – with additional financing garnered from Polygram, British Screen and the European Community through a funding treaty involving Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia.
Lead producer Cedamir Kolar of Noe Productions, who counts among his credits the visionary Macedonian film Before the Rain and Emir Kusturica’s brilliant but compromised US debut, Arizona Dreaming, talks about Through the Day’s genesis. “Idrissa always wanted to make a big film about French colonisation in Burkina … a period epic. But with all the hassles and huge expense of such an idea, he decided he wanted to make something more modest. Small in size and populist. I like the idea that you can take a movie to some community and project it on a bed-sheet.”
Kolar explains that Through the Day is a minimalist story. “It’s a melodramatic tale of friendship; there are no spectacular moments apart from character.” In it, South African actors Vusi Kunene and David Mohloki play two friends who discover a battered old car and restore it with the idea of travelling to the city. They eventually start a business together, but everything goes sour when greed and jealousy get the better of them.
Director Ouedraogo is probably best known for his painterly rural epics such as the exquisite Tilai (The Law), a tale of honour and incest in a small village which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. His films are all notable for their intense attention to picaresque detail. Frankie Loader, wardrobe designer on Through the Day, agrees: “He has images in his mind that are quite specific and generally relate to a West African kind of styling. In this film we had to define the difference between the urban and rural environments through the wardrobe.”
Despite the intense heat, there’s an easy- going, playful atmosphere on set. As I arrive they are shooting a scene in the clapped-out, rusty Rover 100. Ouedraogo sits under a big beach umbrella watching the scene on a video monitor. He seems to be doing the assistant director’s work as he shouts, “Silence! Moteur! Go Kini!” in an indelible French accent and with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Vusi Kunene climbs out of the car, delivers his first line and then stops, distracted. A donkey in the background has farted. Everyone breaks out in laughter, but after a few minutes Ouedraogo shouts “Vous etes prt? (Are you ready?)”. The technicians are ready and they go for another take, cinematographer Jean- Paul Merisse (who photographed Lars Von Trier’s visually stunning Europa and his latest award-winning picture Breaking the Waves) capturing the scene on Super 35mm.
Most of the crew are enamoured of the director. “His English improves day by day. He’s very endearing; quite an inspiration actually. The other day an actor was performing like a snail, so when Idrissa gave him direction he mimicked the actor speaking very slowly,” Loader relates with an affectionate smile. Special assistant on the project Edwin Angless is equally charmed: “What’s amazing about him is he goes again and again, and if the scene’s not working he thinks on his feet and comes up with an immediate solution.”
A veteran of African cinema (he worked on Souleyman Cisse’s Yeleen, among others), Angless relates an anecdote about the shoot. “There was this day when Idrissa designed an incredibly complicated semi-circular track to cover a scene. But the dialogue ran out before the shot did. John Kani came up with a solution – a joke that fitted perfectly. And with no hesitation Idrissa went with it.”
Evidently he has a great way of dealing with tension on the set, telling jokes about things like eunuchs from Mali to defuse the situation. Although based in France, it seems that Ouedraogo hasn’t been totally accepted by the Gallic person in the street, and remains a film festival figure as opposed to a popular cineaste.
The man is remarkably energetic. He sleeps little. The night before the shoot he was partying until dawn and already up-and- pumping on set at 6am. When I asked him where he gets all the energy from, he was surprised. “It’s simple. I like life.”
One-time ZPRA officer and victim of a CCB car bomb in 1987, co-producer Jeremy Brickhill of Zimbabwe’s Framework is especially proud of the project. “This is exactly the kind of film we want to be involved in – a mixture of Zimbabwean and South African cast and crew and a Burkinabe director … It reflects our commitment to a Pan African cinema.”
When I ask Ouedraogo about this kind of lofty ideal he responds in a refreshingly candid way, “Pan African ideas mean nothing to me. That’s a political idea. The point is that cinema is 100 years old, but in Africa it’s 25 years young. Each country is still trying to find its feet, so by working together we can develop a stronger identity for African cinema.”
With Africa’s most esteemed director now working in English and down south, it seems that African cinema is moving away from the ghettos of French colonial and cultural paternalism and developing its own new persona.