When having to cancel my second MIFF film on Saturday required me to pick a second film on Wednesday night, which then ultimately got changed to Friday night due to the soccer, I reverse-engineered a reason for my interest in Ramata-Toulaye Sy's Banel & Adama, set in Senegal. Given I could tell (from the title and the synopsis) that it was a love story, likely a tragic love story, set among people living in the traditional ways, I hoped it might be the next Tanna.
It got closer than I ever thought it would.
I went into the city to work for the second Friday in a row, both for MIFF reasons, though this time it would be only the one movie, unlike the three I'd caught the previous Friday. After a very slow day at work (which I'll mention in a post I've written but not yet published), I got my steps in by walking up to North Melbourne to buy these bike lights I like from a bike shop there. Alas, upon arrival, I found the place swept away, presumably by the pandemic. It was actually the second venerable institution I passed, the other being a kitchen appliance store, that had shuttered sometime in recent history. We've bounced back, healthwise, enough from the pandemic that I tend to forget that its economic repercussions are still rearing their heads.
I still had time to go to my favorite Indian restaurant for a quick dinner before reporting to the Capitol Theatre for the 6 p.m. show.
The Capitol was really the experience I was trying to capture when I first signed up for the cancelled Saturday night movie Mercy Road, and when I selected Banel & Adama for Wednesday. Fortunately, the latter's Friday show was also at the Capitol, so it looks like I was destined to in fact visit this theater in 2023.
Why is the Capitol so great? Well, I've shown you the picture below, or some variation, before, but it was ages ago, so I might as well post again the picture I took last night:
They shut the colors off once the movie starts, but it's really the crazy architecture of the ceiling that I find so pleasing. It's a bold art deco design that you just don't see around anymore, and it makes the Capitol a desirable MIFF destination regardless of what movie is playing.
And this was quite a good one.
Banel & Adama is, quite astonishingly, Sy's filmmaking debut. She was present for the screening, and it prompted me to finally stay for my first Q&A of the festival, despite having an opportunity to do so at almost all of my previous screenings.
Banel (Khady Mane) is a young woman in a Senegalese village who is desperately in love with her husband, Adama (Mamadou Diallo), the son of the deceased tribal chief. It's Adama's birthright to become the next chieftain, but he's only 19 years old and another tribal elder has been serving the function while he comes of age. Adama rejects this opportunity, partially out of a genuine desire not to do the job but partly because Banel wants him all to herself. She's got an idea that they will move out of the village and live in an abandoned house that is buried in sand. If they have the initiative to dig the house out, they can live there -- but the locals all worry that the house is cursed. And Adama's rejection of the chieftainship may be making the curse worse, because the village is in severe drought and the cattle begin dying.
I won't talk too much more about the direction this goes, but it deviates from the Tanna template in a number of ways that make it a pretty imperfect comparison. Just because two films are both set in tribal communities and involve romances does not make them worth stacking up next to each other, though I don't think you're going to blame me if one reminded me of the other on the surface. We movie people are wired to see such similarities in determining our potential interest in any given film.
However, this movie's direction appealed to a different side of my cinephile brain, one that responds to portrayals of psychological disturbance and approaching apocalypse. Sy is extraordinarily gifted in all the aspects required of a filmmaker, from framing to visual camera distortions to sound design -- to say nothing of her ability to get adequate performances out of her novice actors. I say "adequate" because only one or two roles require much range, one of which is Mane in the title role, who gives a truly accomplished performance for a first-timer. The film even required light use of visual effects and other practical effects with some degree of difficulty.
The accomplishment of Banel & Adama is as impressive as it is because it both comes from a part of the world where we don't see a lot of cinema, and is from someone who is directing her first feature. She did go to film school, as I learned in the Q&A afterward, and I believe she also grew up in France, so it's not like she's just some local Senegalese phenom who picked up a camera one day and started filming.
The totality of this experience was one of feeling immersed in all the tools of cinema, and it's a good reminder not to disregard cinema from particular corners of the world due to a regrettable assumption that they're going to be unsophisticated in some way.
The Q&A moderator didn't select my question from among the ones sent in to her on Slido -- this is the first MIFF where they've used that technology rather than a roving MIFF volunteer with a microphone -- but I loved listening to Sy talk, and was sympathetically amused to hear her final answer to the question of what comes next for her. She's been on the festival circuit since the film debuted at Cannes, so she laughed and said she just wanted to get some sleep.
Tonight is my final MIFF movie in the theater, before MIFF shifts online for a final week involving a limited selection of the festival's films.
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