Around Cabo Corrientes in the department of Chocó, where the jungle mountain rushes over the Colombian Pacific, lives a community of Afro-Colombians descended from slaves to the Spanish colonization, the so-called Maroons. In that narrow strip, and far from the world, they are dedicated to agriculture and fishing, building sailboats with the wood of a single log. Life has been hard at se. The storms...
“Socotra, the island of djinns” is based on the book “Socotra, la isla de los genios” published by Atalanta ediciones.The film is the story of a trip on the remote island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, known in antiquity for its Phoenix and Rukh birds. In the rest of the Indian Ocean, the monsoon winds, have propitiated commerce and civilisation. Without any bay or natural port and...
Four years after the filming of “Return to the Land of Souls”, about the rituals of trance and possession, the narrator goes back to the Ivory Coast in search of a priestess possessed by the spirit of a panther. Filmed in black and white, with the rhythm of a road movie, the narrator will travel to Ghana, with the priestress and her entourage, to look for the only drummers who are able to invoke the...
In the 21st century many ancestral beliefs are struggling to survive in a hostile, fast-changing world. In southeast Ivory Coast, some Akan communities still make contact with the spirits through Komians or animistic priests who go into a trance and are possessed by the spirits of the Forest and the Waters.Jean Marie Addiaffi (1941-1999), a writer and intellectual from Ivory Coast, fought to conserve the...