The second of my two archive screenings featuring films with female editors was this 1982 feature by Gaston Kaboré. The editor in question is Andrée Davanture, the French woman who founded a company called Atria in Paris in 1953. After working with several well-known French directors, she later worked with some of the most significant francophone African directors including Souleymane Cissé from Mali, Safi Faye from Senegal and Gaston Kaboré among others (see this website). Beautifully restored by Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Wênd Kûuni was projected in Academy (1:1.37) in stunning colour with especially good lighting and grading to produce a range of dark skin tones.
Wênd Kûuni is one of the first of what Manthia Diawara termed ‘return to the source’ films. The earliest Sub-Saharan African films had tended to take a neo-realist approach to contemporary life in the newly established independent francophone states of West Africa. Later this became a more sophisticated historical approach analysing the process of colonisation in the films of Sembène Ousmane, Med Hondo and others. The return to source was an attempt to present African stories from pre-colonial times and to try to find a new aesthetic for a distinctively African cinema. Some directors also saw this approach as a way of avoiding censorship in the difficult days of neo-colonialist rule by new authoritarian leaders.
Kaboré’s film is set during the period of the Mossi kingdoms which lasted for hundreds of years before the French imperialist forces arrived in the Upper Volta region in 1896. (Upper Volta became Burkina Faso in 1984 after the film was released.) The film begins with a woman being told that her husband is missing and she is worried about how she and her son will cope. A transition then moves the story on and a pedlar is riding his donkey through the bush. Hearing a sound, he investigates and finds a boy clearly ailing and exhausted beneath a ragged cloth. He decides to take the boy with him to the next village he intends to visit and there the boy is taken in by a weaver who accepts him into his family – he has a wife and a little girl. The weaver decides to name the boy ‘God’s gift’.
Wend Kuuni recovers after he is fed and watered but he refuses to speak. As he recovers he becomes the family’s shoat (sheep?goats?) herder. Eventually comes the moment when a dispute in the village (concerning the role and behaviour of women) escalates so that Wend Kuuni is himself shocked back into speech. The plotline of the narrative does not contain many dramatic moments but it more than makes up for this with an observation of daily life in the village. I enjoyed the film very much. Following Keith’s comments on Osaka Elegy, I don’t know whether it was a film or digital print but it looked good. Several years after the film’s production in 1995, Gaston Kaboré made the following comment as part of celebrations for the centenary of cinema:
A society daily subjected to foreign images eventually loses its identity and its capacity to forge its own destiny.
The development of Africa implies among other things the production of its own images.
The Case for Global Film 
Roy’s description is interesting and the ‘genre’ angle is good.
It was screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in a digital restoration on a proper theatrical DCP: I assume that this screening used the same version.The plot-line is very simple but the presentation of characters is complex. I have sene it twice now and revisiting it bought out further aspects. There are a number of such features being restored by the World Cinema Foundation; hopefully we will get to see these in time.
LikeLike