Accueil: Behind the stories

Filmmaker: Renato Duque

Year of production: 2020
Location: Cameroon
Duration:  30 minutes
Sound: mono
Language: Dii, Fulfulde, Mboum, French, English
English Subtitles

How can I portray anthropological content after staying for mere ninety days in the field? The answer is to let the people who have lived there for their whole lives to create the story for me. Accueil (2020) was written by a Cameroonian theater club, acted by non-actors Interacting with the club members, and co-directed by the president of the club, Lawan Pascal, and by me. Accueil: Behind-the-stories shows the process for creating an ethnographic fictional script under the formal structure of a theater group in a hierarchical country. The various ideas for depicting the given theme of welcoming / receiving (accueil, in French) were funneled to the story of a family of foreigners being attacked by a local who was not aware that his father had let them stay. A mediator takes them to the chief of the village, who solves the quarrel and has them become friends. In every society, oral tradition has been responsible for transmitting to the younger generations concepts that build their ethics, morality and code of conduct through tales, fables and legends. This innate characteristic is present in this dramatization whose objective is to teach people about how Cameroon welcomes everybody who arrives there, including me.
 

Copyright: 2020  Visual Cultural Studies, University of Tromsø

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