Al Djanat
Chloé Aïcha Boro
France, Burkina Faso, Benin, Germany | 2023 | 84 min
International Premiere
Languages : Bambara, French
Subtitles : French, English
When her uncle dies, director Chloé Aïcha Boro films her family’s courtyard in Dédougou, Burkina Faso. Framed by her camera, the shared space becomes the stage of the inheritance dispute that unfolds. A conflict between the gatekeepers of family tradition and those defending property interests, advocating for a modernity inherited from Western colonisation.
When her uncle dies, director Chloé Aïcha Boro films her family's courtyard in Dédougou, Burkina Faso. The event triggers a dual narrative movement upon which the filmmaker immediately seizes. The space shared by the family is also the guarantor of secular tradition, and the death of the patriarch – the region's religious authority – causes questions to emerge regarding the ownership and use of the courtyard. As a female member of the family who has moved abroad, Chloé Aïcha Boro approaches this crisis at the crossroads of tradition and modernity from a highly personal perspective. The courtyard is her point of anchorage, where her culture is rooted, where her umbilical cord is buried. The director constructs her film around this space, whose equilibrium is now shattered. As the conflict unfolds on the small family stage, where each member’s entrance and exit only serves to further complicate matters, a larger trial begins to play out: that of a changing society, in which even family identity is transformed by the influence of the West.
Madeline Robert
Le Loup d’or de Balolé, 2019
France-Aurevoir, Le nouveau commerce triangulaire, 2017
Farafin ko, Une cour entre deux mondes, 2014
