Documentary
Asientos
François Woukoache · 1995
Synopsis
A century after the end of the deportations to the New World, a young African, deeply marked by the violence he still witnesses, takes refuge in imagination in the places of the slave trade, on the island of Gorée. The slave house there becomes like a body he travels through. For lack of images of the past, which left only a few drawings, the film invents what has left no trace and follows this quest through the pain and suffering of the history of Black people.
Context
The title takes up the name of the licences by which sixteenth-century Spain entrusted the slave trade to European companies. Woukoache worked on it for five years; he refused the history lesson the funders wanted and claims an imaginary reality rather than a reconstruction, in a film of fifty-two minutes, in French. Olivier Barlet interviewed him for Africultures in 1998 about this quest for traces conceived as a reaction to the present. The film is shown at several festivals and classed among the documentaries on the slave trade.
Who it is for
In French, fifty-two minutes. The film is meditative, almost without narrative; it asks the viewer to accept being disoriented.
Prizes and reception
No prize found for this film, which was praised by critics and selected for the catalogue of the New York African Film Festival.