With a fierce eye, a woman gently puts the child she is carrying on her back in place while adjusting her machine gun. Raped, left for dead after the massacre in the desert of the men of her family by terrorists, Sira wants to achieve revenge. And find her fiancé, whom she and her family had gone to join for a marriage that promised to be happy. "Without compromise", Apolline Traoré's film is as much as its director, who asserts herself "entirely" in her fifth feature film, between resilience and resistance. Screened on Tuesday February 28 during Fespaco, the pan-African film festival, Sira is competing for the Yennenga Gold Stallion for best African fiction feature film. There was a huge crowd to welcome and the emotion was powerful especially for the final scene.
Her heroine, she wanted her to be a fighter to overcome the shock she herself felt during the Yirgou massacre, in Burkina Faso, in January 2019. After a terrorist attack that left six people from the Mossi ethnic group dead, including a traditional leader, Koglweogo militias killed in retaliation more than 72 Fulani: "I was sincerely shocked because I have never known such a Burkina. It was like therapy to start writing this story, because I was deeply moved. »
Sira is a symbol: “My film talks about terrorism in the Sahel and tells how people fight to defend themselves and survive. I decided to take a woman as the heroine, because since the beginning of this scourge, we talk a lot about the actions of the army or politicians, but we talk much less about women, about how they fight. When I went scouting, I met women in the camps for displaced people near Dori. Each had an extraordinary story to tell and the heroine of my film is somewhat representative of these women, of their fighting spirit. »
A shoot strewn with pitfalls
The 46-year-old Burkinabe director is used to starting from real dramas to build her fictions. Desrances, his previous feature film, already selected for Fespaco 2019, told the civil war of 2010-2011 in Côte d'Ivoire through the destiny of a father and his daughter.
Co-produced by Les Films Selmon in Burkina, Araucania Films in France, One Fine Day Films in Germany and Dakar Film in Senegal, it will take four years for Apolline Traoré to gather a budget of 1.2 million euros for the filming of Sira. And a hell of a lot of perseverance to finish it, as its progress was strewn with pitfalls. Apolline wanted to film her new fiction in Burkina Faso, delighted to have found the location for her filming with the enthusiastic support of the inhabitants she met in the Dori area, during her scouting with the Burkinabe army. But she finally had to give it up. Ten days after "everything stalled", a new massacre was perpetrated on June 5, 2021, in Solhan, killing more than 160 civilians. It is the deadliest attack in Burkina Faso since the start of the conflict in 2015: "The government told me that it was no longer possible to shoot in this area, that they were not going to deploy the army there to protect a team for three months, which is normal, the army has other priorities. »
Apolline then relocates the filming to Mauritania, near the town of Atar, where the closest desert is, "the safest", she specifies. With the challenge of moving, feeding and housing more than 60 people there for three months without being able to increase its original budget. The vagaries of the climate added to the difficulty: while this area of the Mauritanian desert had not seen water for five years, torrential rains, every two weeks, took the barely installed film crew by surprise, destroying sets and blocking access roads to the point of bringing everything to a standstill for days. The torrential episodes are followed by waves of suffocating heat, putting the main actress, Nafissatou Cissé, to the test. “It was a succession of misfortunes,” recalls Apolline today, happy to have overcome all this adversity.
Euphoric success
When she meets Le Monde Afrique, the director is still on cloud nine after learning in the middle of the Fespaco opening ceremony that her film had received the Audience Award at the Berlinale in Germany, which she had left the day before. "We have been told for years that African cinema is difficult to distribute, so to see a film from the continent being rewarded in this great festival means that there is an audience, that you just have to place it well and that the whole world will be sensitive to it. For the screenings in Berlin, the halls were full. »
A euphoric success that is not enough to take away the feeling of being "under pressure" as she is expected with Sira, the only Burkinabe film in competition for the Golden Stallion for best fiction feature film of this 28th edition. No Burkinabe director has won the prize since 1997 and Gaston Kaboré with Buud Yam. Twenty-six years of waiting therefore weigh on the shoulders of a filmmaker who has returned to her native country thanks to her "godfather" and friend, the Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouedraogo, a respected figure in African cinema.
While the young woman intended to build her career in the United States, where she had trained on independent films after studying cinema at Emerson College in Boston (Massachusetts), Mr. Ouedraogo convinced her in 2001, after their meeting at his first Fespaco, to "come back to tell stories in the country" and offers him to write a series. This is followed by Monia et Rama, Apolline Traoré's first fictional episode, marking the beginning of a long collaboration between the young shoot of Burkinabe cinema and one of its pioneers.
An act of resistance
The director of Tilaï will have a great influence on his work and will be his producer until 2011: "I learned thanks to his cinema to slow down a little compared to what I wrote. America gave me the technical tools to make my cinema. Africa gave me its culture, its rhythm, sometimes slow, which I must respect. If the American way is felt in the action scenes of her films, the director also allows herself more contemplative scenes, a way of articulating this double inspiration.
But his very first source, the one that has led him since the beginning of his career to prefer drama to comedy, remains the cinema of Christophe Kieslowski, Polish director of the Blue, White, Red trilogy. "I'm always into drama because it's a therapeutic way to move on with my life. I can't go to the front, I'm not a politician, I can only use my art to express my pain. »
Can her heroine, who recovers and resists after having lived through the worst, give hope to her compatriots? Apollo hopes so. While Burkina Faso experienced a new deadly attack in the north on February 21, the holding of Fespaco, which was never canceled, is experienced as an act of resistance by its organizers and the entire African cinema community. And for Apolline, the stakes of an award "go far beyond" her. Sira is a film of resilience, a message: "If receiving the Etalon d'Or can give comfort to the population, then I would have gained a little. This Yennenga, if attributed to me, is not for me but for the people, for Burkina Faso, for our cinema. " There is no doubt that at the sight of the crowd waiting to attend the screening, so dense that many could not access the room, and the intensity of the emotion that gripped the spectators during the final scene, Apolline Traoré has already won the prize of the heart. Verdict Saturday March 4, in Ouagadougou.
