Laughter resonates in the class full of students in this small school in the suburbs of Dakar (Senegal). These are not exclamations of joy, they are mockery. In the room, all ages mix. Next to the teacher, a schoolboy is on the ground, kneeling. Around his neck, a slate on which it is written in chalk “I am a donkey”. This scene is taken from the film “Le Symbole”, a seven-minute short film “which went around the world” in the 90s. Its director, Ahmadou Diallo, has lived “incognito” in Lorient since 1995. Every morning, he drinks his coffee at Barikade, a small neighborhood bar, always with a hat on his head, “ [sa] brand “. At home, his flat screen is framed by two home cinema speakers. He takes a DVD out of a broken box, tampers with the cables of the player and the image, with its aged grain, appears on the screen. “When it was released, my film broke the web,” he smiles.
Speak French “to succeed”
“Many people didn’t understand what I wanted to do. People thought I was criticizing colonization. Honestly, I just wanted to make people laugh, but people saw a political film.” Ahmadou Diallo wanted to tell childhood memories. “The teachers forced us to speak French,” explains the 72-year-old from Lorient, who has lived longer in France than in Senegal. But they didn’t do it out of malice, they did it so that we could succeed better in life.” Even though Senegal regained its independence in 1960, the Frenchification of the country during the colonial era stretched the feeling of French elitism until the 1990s. When a child, unfortunately, spoke Fulani or Wolof, he had right to the “symbol”, this slate attached to his neck, so that the whole world would know that he had made a false step. “This film was very successful here in Brittany, I think it’s because the Bretons experienced it with their mother tongue.”
The cold machine of French cinema
“I financed my studies by working. By day, I was a construction worker, in the evening, I went to classes at the French cinema conservatory.” Diploma in hand, Ahmadou Diallo comes up against the cold wall of this big machine, that of French cinema, the key to which is needed to understand the workings. “A professor friend hooked me up: he knew the wife of Jean-Luc Godard, whose sister ran a post-production organization in Paris, Atria [une association qui appuyait les travaux des réalisateurs africains en France, fermée en 1999, NDLR]. She told me that I would be able to meet filmmakers from the Third World, and that perhaps that would give me courage.” In 1993, he went to the National Cinema Center, script under his arm. “Almost a thousand people were queuing in the cold to submit their applications.” He was selected among ten winners. “And there, all the people of Atria say to themselves: “Oh my, but Ahmadou is not that stupid”.” He laughs remembering this old story, these few sequences which played out the reel of his career.
“A camera, a lot of stuff”
In the corridors of the agency, Ahmadou has his mind elsewhere, he is thinking. “I wanted to make this film, I didn’t know how to go about it. A colleague gave me a camera and some fluff, and we did it.” Without casting or management, he chooses his actors on the fly in the streets of Thongor, a district north of the capital. The short film was purchased by Canal + before being completed, “they didn’t want to miss the boat”.
From festivals to conferences, “Le Symbole” tours everywhere. The filmmaker recounts the sleepless nights in hotels, the bottles of wine bought at the airport, a drunken evening with Almodovar… In 1995, he turned his back on the bustle of Paris and opted for the intimacy of the city with six ports . He set up his production company there, “the first in Lorient created by an African”. Since then, he has stopped his activity, caught in the gears of life. At home, his framed awards cover an entire wall. “One day, a French director asked me if I was aware that I had made the best African film. I replied that I had made a film, that’s all.”
#Senegal
