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Rachid Bouchareb's Little Senegal
It's like Roots in reverse, Rachid Bouchareb tells Nick Roddick, describing the theme of his film Little Senegal. It was the hands that did it. "I was at the second callback," recalls American actress Sharon Hope of the process which brought her the lead female role in Rachid Bouchareb's, Little Senegal. "Everyone was talking, and Rachid was just sitting there, looking and looking at me." He was looking at her hands, realising they were incredibly like those of Sotigui Kouyaté, the Burkinabe actor who would play opposite her in the film. "I needed that degree of physical resemblance, that proximity," says the Algerian-born director, who has been exploring the idea behind the film for several years. "I wanted to make a film about the meeting between Africa and black America but, in so doing, I wanted to reverse the scheme of Roots: I wanted it to be about an African coming to America and discovering the gulf which divides the two cultures." Little Senegal tells the story of Alloune, a 65-year-old widower who works as a tour guide at the Museum of Slavery in Senegal, and who fulfills a lifelong ambition by heading for North America to try and trace the route taken by his ancestors into slavery in the New World. "It's difficult," says Bouchareb, "because so many documents were destroyed after the Civil War, in order to try and forget about slavery. There is a scene in the film where Alloune shows Ida [Hope's character] the documents he has brought with him, and she has never seen anything like them. I have followed some of my character's journey, and I had some of the same experiences. There is such a distance between the two cultures, and nothing to fill it." Which is why the hands were so important. "The hands," he says, "and the arms, and the face - the whole physical presence of the character." Hope, who has just got off a plane from New York, pulls back the sleeves of her leather jacket. "We even have the same wrists. And here, round the eyes," she says. Ironically, this question of resemblance initially thwarted Bouchareb's initial efforts to raise the money for the film. He had showed his screenplay to Danny Glover -- an actor with a strong interest in Africa and African cinema -- and Glover had loved it. He had even offered to play the central character, if that would help raise money for the film. But Bouchareb wouldn't budge. "It wasn't an easy subject to raise money for," he admits (the film is, in its final incarnation, a co-production between Bouchareb's own company in Algeria, France's enterprising 3B Productions, and Germany's Taunus Films). "But the physical character of the African in America -- that's what my film is all about. When they are together, when they talk, when they walk together, you have to see Africa and America. If you don't see that, then I don't have a film." The notion of a cultural divide between the inhabitants of a country and those who have left it several generations before but who are still defined in their new country by their origins - there is nothing new in that; after all, Irish Americans are famously 'more Irish than the Irish themselves'. "I have experienced this same métissage, this same coming apart of culture," says Bouchareb, who is Algerian, lives in Paris, but frequently visits his extended family in Algeria. But what makes Little Senegal striking is that, unlike Roots, it is not so much a question of Alloune finding reassuring traces of his own culture in Harlem, so much as of coming to terms with a rejection that Bouchareb doesn't flinch from calling racist. "The first time they meet," says Bouchareb, "he says, 'I'm from Senegal', and she says, 'Why don't you go back there?' I've experienced this and I have African friends who have said the same thing: that they find it easier to talk to white Americans! There aren't the same tensions." But Alloune and Ida do eventually make contact. "So I guess in that sense the film is optimistic," says Bouchareb. "You get the feeling that contact is possible - not easy, but possible, at any rate between people of their generation. They are both alone. It is the story of a man and a woman who find ways of talking about their loneliness." Nick Roddick
Little Senegal |
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