Director: Pierre Yves Clouin.

Director: Pierre Yves Clouin.

Director: Methil Komalankutty.
The old man in the family feels that the other members of the family are totally insensitive to his attempts at communicating with them and even to his presence among them. Tasting the bitterness of being marginalized and feeling the pangs of dreary loneliness, he looks around for solace and finds a reflection of himself in the lonely ornamental fish in the aquarium. He tries to fondle the fish. It is only natural that his attempts at fondling the fish are mistaken as the manifestation of an old man’s deranged mind.

Director: LACHAISE Joris.
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.