Cinema
Pêcheurs du Chari
Édouard Sailly · 1966
Synopsis
This seventeen-minute documentary short, shot on 35 mm in black and white, films the fishermen of the Chari. Dictionaries of African cinema list it among the ethnographic documentaries of its author, who trained at the Actualités françaises. Its sequences are not described; a press study places it among the films in which Sailly captures the daily life of anonymous people, with a near-ethnographic attention and the tenderness of someone who belongs to what he shows.
Context
Sailly is regarded as the first filmmaker of Chad. This film dates from 1966 according to the Dictionnaire du cinéma africain and the Dictionnaire mondial du cinéma, and from 1964 according to more recent entries. The journal Souffles cites it with Le Troisième Jour among the Chadian films in an African list; this second film, which won a prize at the Saint-Cast festival, remains its author's best-known and is held at the Cinémathèque. Sailly's work comprises at least eight short films up to 1972, and an American programmer who wanted to show it had trouble tracing him.
Who it is for
A short documentary from 1966, for those interested in the beginnings of Chadian cinema and in the ethnographic gaze of the sixties.
Prizes and reception
A 2011 dictionary still counts it among Sailly's ethnographic films, alongside a film from 1972.