Yam daabo: On Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Humanist Cinema

Yam daabo premiered at the 1987 FESPACO festival (the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), just months before the assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, that October. Ouédraogo’s cinematic training exemplifies the mixture of colonial remnants, international solidarities, Pan-Africanist circuits, and nationalist desires that affected many African filmmakers of his generation. He moved to Ouagadougou—both a national and a Pan-Africanist film capital—to study at the African Institute for Cinema Studies (INAFEC), which, while short-lived, trained over two hundred students from across West Africa between 1976 and 1987, including fellow Burkinabe filmmaker Fanta Régina Nacro. Ouédraogo graduated with a master’s degree from INAFEC in 1981 with a short film, Poko, which was awarded Best Short Film at FESPACO. He worked for the national film production company before entering a brief Soviet period, studying film in Kyiv. Later, he pursued further cinematic studies at the French Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) as well as the Sorbonne. Between Ouagadougou, Kyiv, and Paris, his trajectory reflects the complex terrains many of his peers also had to navigate. On the one hand, postcolonial governments were trying to harness the nascent local cinema industry to the needs of the nation-state. On the other hand, production and distribution circuits were still dominated by former colonial powers. Added to this was the Cold War context, in which Soviet solidarities helped to fund and train Third Cinema and Pan-Africanist film movements.

Ouédraogo refused to be reduced to one, formulaic type of cinema, and often decried international film critics’ desire to put African cinema into a cage of sorts. His early feature films, based in rural Burkina Faso, using nonprofessional actors and majestic Sahel landscapes, achieved international success: these include Yam daabo (winner of the Georges Sadoul Prize, 1986), Yaaba (Sakura Grand Prix at the 1989 Tokyo International Film Festival; International Film Critics Prize at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival), and Tilaï (Grand Prix at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival). His later works struggled to replicate this acclaim, but in spite of this, Ouédraogo went on to have a prolific and deliberately eclectic career, resisting predetermined molds and constantly experimenting with new genres, new languages, and new themes. Alongside narrative features and short films, he also directed documentaries and television productions. His fifth feature, Samba Traoré (1992), is a Burkina-based thriller, which he followed with Le cri du coeur (1994), a melodrama set in France. In 1997, he made Kini & Adams, his first film shot in English, which is set in Zimbabwe, features a cast of professional South African actors, and embraces that nation’s heritage of anti-apartheid freedom songs and theater. In a 2002 interview with Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, reflecting on the lukewarm international reception of his works not set in rural Burkina Faso, Ouédraogo affirmed, resolutely, “there is not a single African cinema; there must be African cinemas.”

We see elements of that quest for polyphonic modes of expression early in Yam daabo, as the film deftly weaves together genres including the family epic, the romantic melodrama, landscape cinema, and comedy. The political economy of aid, development, and neocolonialism never overcomes the human story that Ouédraogo foregrounds: a tale of love, deception, jealousy, anger, grief, and new beginnings. “Militant cinema is fine, but cinema that shows Africa in another form is also militant because it permits Africa and others to see that there is laughing and crying here. Cinema is universal,” he stated in the same interview. Yam daabo exemplifies the filmmaker’s commitment to putting marginal figures at the center of his narratives, such as children, the elderly, drunks, adulterers, thieves, or migrants. We see Bintou and her friend, two adolescents, chatting, laughing, playing, and meeting lovers in the interstices of labor and familial obligations. Youthful love and friendship are treated as subjects worthy of emotional depth and weight on their own terms. There is a quest for a universality of feelings in Ouédraogo’s cinema that is anchored by his protagonists’ strong sense of individuality. The unforgettable ensemble of Yam daabo is made up of singular characters, not types.

Character-driven drama, however, is only one of the multiple modalities of the film. Ouédraogo revels in more realistic, documentary-based sequences centered on the daily rhythms of village life and labor, which he had previously explored in shorts such as The Bowls (1983) and Issa le tisserand (1985). At times, the film’s more experimental poetic sequences take precedence over narrative continuity. Ouédraogo’s concise shot language spares no cuts or ellipses. We know little, for instance, of the administrative or material difficulties the family might have encountered in settling in a new land. But the filmmaker offers, instead, moving long takes of the journey itself across sumptuous Sahelian landscapes. The poetic focus on agricultural labor, its rhythms, and its evocative sounds is reminiscent of the cinema of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye, who, in ways similar to Ouédraogo, also directed a resolutely tender, aesthetically sublime, and complex cinematic gaze on African peasantries who are too often depicted as unidimensional.

In spite of the singular choice indicated in the title of the film, Yam daabo is about myriad repeated decisions to insist on living and loving in the midst of scarcity or danger. “Let’s move!” and other variations on that tune become a familiar refrain throughout the film, an ethical imperative. Most memorably, it caps one of the film’s most traumatic sequences, during the family’s sojourn in the city. When the chorus of honking and harsh traffic sounds suddenly gives way to the sound of screeching tires followed by silence, life comes to a standstill. Passersby gaze in silence at the lifeless body of the little boy Ali, in compassionate spectatorship. Immediately after that, Ouédraogo, using a shot language full of deliberately abrupt slashes, cuts to a brief cemetery scene, before the family patriarch imperiously shouts, “Let’s go!” Except for the mother’s brief reluctance, no tears, no words are spared for the immense loss that has sliced through the fabric of the family. Life continues, the filmmaker tells us, in cut after cut, refusing to sugarcoat the abrasiveness of life with smooth transitions.

At the core of Ouédraogo’s cinema is a concern with ethics, individual dilemmas, and growth. He celebrates the collective ability to invent new possibilities and new beginnings without sacrificing the fierce individual personalities that form his cast of characters. Bintou, for instance, bravely asserts her love for Issa in defiance of her father, secure in the belief that time will mend the patriarch’s resistance to her choice of life partner. Tiga—Bintou’s stalker, who attempts to murder Issa, the man she loves—ends up banished from the community, exiled to the city. Ouédraogo’s humanistic narratives do not glide over the fierce disagreements and tensions that pull at the threads of the community. Rather than a fixed unit, the community emerges as a living, malleable assemblage; rather than a destiny, they face a constantly renegotiated choice to struggle together. Bintou’s baby, whose birth ultimately mends some of the dissensions between generations at the end, is named after the brother she lost at the beginning of the film: Ali. Life must go on.