Direction: Eric Barbier
Year: 2020
Duration: 107 min.
Country: France
Cast: Jean-Paul Rouve, Djibril Vancoppenolle, Dayla De Medina, Isabelle Kabano, Veronika Varga, Jonas D’Adesky
Genre: Drama, Africa
Script: Eric Barbier.
Book: Gaël Faye
Music: Renaud Barbier
Photography : Antoine Sanier
Producer: Coproducción Francia-Bélgica; Jerico, Super 8 Production, Pathé, France 2 Cinema, Scope Pictures, Petit Pays Film, Canal+, Ciné+, France Télévisions
Distributor in Spain : Sherlock Films
Premiere in Spain: May 21, 2021
Original version: in French subtitles in Spanish.
2020: César Awards: Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay
SYNOPSIS
Gabriel is 10 years old and lives in a comfortable expat neighborhood in Burundi, his “little country”. Gabriel is a normal, happy and carefree boy who lives daily adventures with his friends and his little sister. Suddenly, in 1993, tensions in neighboring Rwanda erupted, endangering both his family and his innocence.
THE CRITICISM
“The film is luminous and describes, with flashes of memory, a happy, fun and out-of-context childhood that germinated in his city: the genocide of the Tutsis”
The child’s gaze is one of those preferred by cinema to observe the war from it, perhaps because it provides a special light to the worst and “the best” of what it brings and what it takes, even in the case of being a war as barbaric and bloody as the one that confronted Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi at the end of the last century. The director, Eric Barbier, takes as his landing strip the autobiographical novel by Gaël Faye, a French rapper born in Burundi, from where he emigrated at the age of thirteen and to escape that violent bloodletting.
‘Little country’ is luminous and describes, with flashes of memory, a happy, fun and out of context childhood that germinated in his city, Bujumbura, and in his family, his little sister, his French father and his mother of Tutsi lineage; and it is a virtue of Barbier’s camera that his film contains that charm of the childhood adventure and, well and subtly woven into it, the disenchantment with the world that is falling apart, the progressive transformation of the game into poison; and it is also a virtue of the camera to catch the metamorphosis in the eyes and the interpretation of the young actor Djibril Vancoppenolle, thermometer and flashlight of the narration. Éric Barbier’s film takes the tempo of games, first loves, friendship, celebrations and awakening to life to, without fanfare, unbalance that bucolic Eden and put its pre-adolescents in the difficult trance of having to call a friend an enemy, and to discover how death enters without knocking. A hard journey of tragic initiation and bewilderment.
Next screening: March 3, 2022
THE FAMILY YOU CHOOSEby Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz
Zak is a young man with Down Syndrome who runs away from his residence to pursue his dream of becoming a professional wrestler in a wrestling school. A series of circumstances lead him to meet Tyler, a criminal who has also fled and who will become his coach and ally. Their adventure leads them to meet Eleanor, a somewhat peculiar nurse who joins them on their journey through Northern California.
