La pirogue by Moussa Touré (review)

Reviews 249 wake of a devastating accident; Laurence Anyways (dir. Xavier Dolan), an exuberantly imagined and photographed epic tale that explores the nature of love and the title character’s transition into a transgendered individual; and Inch’Allah (dir. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette), a portrayal of Israeli-Palestinian hostility through the eyes of an outsider (a Québécois obstetrician) living in Israeli territory and working in a West Bank refugee camp. Finally, under the rubric“French Connections”: French directors are working outside France, as evidenced by Rachid Bouchareb’s Just Like a Woman (Great Britain/ United States) and Anne Fontaine’s Two Mothers/Adore (Australia/France). Fontaine’s film, from a Doris Lessing story, was particularly intriguing as the director continued to explore her favorite theme—the emotional and sexual tensions in relationships among women and men. El taaib (The Repentant) by Merzak Allouache (Algerianborn veteran of the French industry) and Les chevaux de Dieu by Nabil Ayouche (Paris-born, Morocco-based) screened in SIFF’s inaugural African Pictures project. Ayouche received the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Director in recognition of his absorbing tale of three boys from a Moroccan bidonville who become suicide bombers. My favorite films this year came from Spain and Estonia. Their connections to France? Both are in French and each features an octogenarian French thespian whose performance is pure pleasure. In The Artist and the Model (dir. Fernando Trueba), Jean Rochefort plays a dispirited artist in Occupied France who is unexpectedly inspired by a young passeuse to make one last attempt to capture Beauty in his art. In A Lady in Paris (dir. Ilmar Raag), Jeanne Moreau (in a supporting role) creates the most cantankerous senior citizen imaginable. Her haughtiness, complaints, and demands (croissants must be au beurre, fresh from the bakery) cause her Estonian caretaker frustration and anger, but eventual compassion and friendship. Deeply humane stories both—don’t miss them! University of Idaho, emerita Joan M. West Touré, Moussa, réal. La pirogue. Int. Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Laïty Fall, Malaminé ‘Yalenguen’ Dramé. Chauves-Souris, 2012. Senegalese director Moussa Touré’s 1997 film TGV was featured at the 2013 New York African Film Festival, due to the great success of La pirogue, his latest. TGV is a comic satire about Rambo, who drives a brightly painted bus between Dakar and Conakry, Guinea, and a host of passengers, each with different reasons for paying the handsome fare to make the dangerous journey. Fifteen years later, La pirogue tells a similar tale, only now as epic tragedy, and the vehicle is a brightly painted huge pirogue piloted by Baye Laye, who can no longer make his living from a sea overfished due in part to his government’s preference for international industrial fishing companies. Like TGV, passengers in La pirogue have different reasons for making the dangerous trip from a popular fishing port of Dakar to the Canary Islands. It is a story featured regularly in newspapers about scores of victims who die en route, or wash up as corpses on tourist beaches, or arrive at their destination only to be repatriated or interned in centres de rétention (one character in the film burns his papers since, according to international law, sans-papiers cannot be returned to a country for which they hold no proof of origin). Touré’s purpose is to move viewers beyond headlines and into the lives of people who, in increasing numbers, leave loved ones, homes, and businesses behind, searching for a better life for themselves and their families. At the port from which the pirogue departs, Touré depicts the construction of numerous étages (as homes with a second floor are called), which, a character remarks, is the sign of a successful crossing to Spain. But it comes with a price: a seven-day trip across open sea in a pirogue offering no shelter from burning sun, raging storms, and dwindling supplies of food, water, and fuel. Passengers, however, by no means share a common dream. Of the thirty lives Baye Laye must navigate to safe harbor, one-third come from a tribe in Guinea seeking no more than the possibility of day labor in Spain...