Afriques: comment ça va avec la douleur?

From July 1993 till February 1996 Raymond Depardon travelled straight through Africa. From the southern tip, where he made a beautiful shot of a silent Nelson Mandela, he successively crossed Angola, Ruanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, Chad and Niger and ended at the Egyptian Nile. The images he presents are both dazzling and tender, and yet they do not arouse feelings of joy. Many countries on the African continent are torn by draught, famine, disease and bloody wars. While travelling on, Depardon discovers that the landscape can be cruel, too: after hundreds of kilometres of dry desert, suddenly the almost mediterranean blue of a lake glistens in the distance. In his occasional comment Depardon wonders what the filmmaker's responsibility is for the images he shows. A photographer not only registers reality, he can also provoke it without necessarily stretching it. In the end it is inevitable for Depardon that a film about Africa is a film about the suffering of this continent. Without using empty rhetoric - in the end the images speak for themselves - Depardon has managed to make an extraordinarily stirring film.