“La Bouche” by Camilo Restrepo
2017 · FR · colour · Sus/en · 19’
A man learns his daughter has been brutally murdered by her husband. Time stands still as he oscillates between the need for solace and his urge for revenge. A musical featuring Guinean percussion master, Mohamed “Red Devil” Bangoura, loosely based on his own story.
Director’s note
I had the idea for this film after meeting Mohamed Bangoura and his son, Ella. Through mutual friends, Mohamed asked me to film a concert in Paris organised in homage to his daughter who had been killed in a case of domestic violence two years earlier. The concert was neither a show nor a ceremony, but Mohamed Bangoura’s music, along with that of members of his family who were performers, established that evening a link between the living and the deceased young woman.
The concert resonated with the work I had done on my previous short film, “Cilaos”, a musical starring the Reunion singer Christine Salem and her musicians. Through traditional Reunion ritual music called Maloya, “Cilaos” evokes the relationship between a daughter and her father who has passed away. It was as if the two stories, one very real and one fictional, communicated with one another and had strong connections between them.
After talking to Mohamed and his family, I decided to work with them on a new film, loosely based on their story. The film, “La Bouche”, isn’t a sequel to “Cilaos” but a mirror that explores the same themes. The two films have the same experimental form: a musical where most of the dialogue is sung, with a non-specific spatio-temporality that allows me to create a kind of contemporary mythical narrative.
The film is entirely sung and spoken in Soussou, one of the languages spoken in Guinea, where the Bangoura family comes from. Traditional West African Djembe drums accompany the songs.
Paradoxically, anchoring the film in a specifically regional language and music opens it to a wider universal reading. By exploring rhythms, traditions, myths and beliefs expressed through music from populations geographically distant from one another, common roots can be found. To highlight this, I wanted to create a decor and time period for the film that refused to be pinned down to a specific place or time: the characters in the film belong to an abstract world, beyond our notion of temporality. More than simply exploring the family tragedy, the film, inspired by Mohamed Bangoura’s experience, questions our relationship with death and justice.
“La Bouche”, as with my previous films, was shot on 16mm film stock and developed at the artist-run laboratory L’Abominable. Since 1996, L’Abominable has offered filmmakers the tools to work with silver-based film material: super-8, 16mm and 35mm. Different machines used for film production have been pooled together: one can develop negative or reversal originals, create blow-ups or optical printer effects, edit, work on sound or strike prints. The filmmakers who already know how to work these machines train the ones who are just starting out.
After this support period, each filmmaker can be independent in his or her work and explore the technical possibilities on their own. In this way, without a selection process for projects, a wide variety of films are produced, including “live” film performances or installations using the film medium. The scope of what is produced there and the specificity of practices make L’Abominable a unique place of creation, a living school of cinematographic techniques.
The artist
Camilo Restrepo (born in 1975, MedellÃn, Colombia) has lived and worked in Paris, France since 1999. He is a member of L’Abominable, an artist-run film laboratory. His films have been selected in festivals including Toronto, New York and Locarno, where he has won the Pardino d’Argento two years running.