Joris Lachaise

How does a film taking post-colonial Africa as its point of departure address the more general problem of the colonization of spirits and bodies by all forms of “conventions?” And how does the celebration of Mali’s half-century of independence in September 2010 become the basis on which to interrogate the function of the rhapsodist, of he who recounts and—in the process—creates? Because, we do not narrate history with impunity. We decide whether or not to use a certain syntax, a vocabulary, a protocol. The maker of Convention opts for the third-person. He decides to place his perspective as a white person, this standard reference that has not finished formatting Africa, at a distance. This is a posture of retreat that does not erase itself, but rather serves as a critical positioning. It is also an attitude of the watchman who captures under the laws of a kaleidoscopic montage the different states of the decolonized body. At the crossroads of documentary, of self-fiction and of film-poems, Convention is a film that claims its essence in the project-form. Free, digressive, inventive, it incites us to consider a non-didactic history and to interrogate the conditions and consequences linked to the acquisition of freedom.