Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) / Yamagata Film Festival
Screenings of Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) and Q&A in International Competition at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan
[Director’s Statement for the festival]
“For me time counts a lot and so that I don’t want to die, I walk with time. I am not doing cinema, I just want to live in time so that this time even after me, remains to count a lot.”
Bouba Touré, 2008
Bouba Touré left us in 2022, a few weeks before the premiere of this film. Until his last breath, Bouba Touré had been a chronicler on one hand of the lives and struggles of those called “African migrant workers” who came to France in the 1960s to rebuild the country after WWII in the aftermath of African independence, and on the other hand of the villagers of the Senegal River in the Soninké region in West Africa. My fifteen-year collaboration with him was a process of deep listening, of exchange based on trust, and of constant learning. Bouba’s practice aimed to reassemble worlds that had been displaced, drawing lines between generations and geographies. This film, by force of circumstance, became a tribute to his meandering life and thoughts, and to the making of the Somankidi Coura cooperative project. Parallel to its distribution, relatives and friends of Bouba Touré are currently working on the inventory of his writing and photography towards an archive, to give access to and circulate his work and storytelling, and take his pan-African pedagogies to the world. In this sense, it is a wonderful honor to have the chance to present our film at the Yagamata festival as it will give me and the viewers the opportunity to imagine a tale that could start with a conversation between Bouba Touré and filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke wandering in the Magino village and continuing in the village of Somankidi Coura.
Location
Yamagata, JP