The jihadist violence that has plagued the Sahel for more than ten years has claimed tens of thousands of lives, including more than 10,000 in Burkina Faso.
The 28th edition of the Fespaco African film festival gives an important place to different female roles, heroines of the anti-jihadist fight, a subject that has become central in recent years in the Sahel. “When we talk about terrorism, we don’t talk a lot about women”, deplores the Burkinabe director Apolline Traoré, whose fiction feature film Sira was selected in the official competition of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco). In this film, the main character is a 25-year-old girl kidnapped by jihadists, who shows courage and intelligence to survive in the horror. In general, “when we talk about women, they are victims in the camps for displaced people, we don’t see their actions”, explains the director who, on the contrary, wishes to show the “big role” women “in this fight against terrorism”.
“Embodying Hope”
The jihadist violence that has plagued the Sahel for more than ten years has claimed tens of thousands of lives, including more than 10,000 in Burkina Faso. Through the character of Sira, her very first film role, Burkinabe actress Nafissatou Cissé says she wanted “give a voice” to these women and embody “hope”. “I must have felt the rage and other emotions of these women,” she explains.
In his short film, The messenger of Godthere Nigerien director Amina Mamani also wanted to show the power of women in the face of the jihadist violence that is also hitting her country. The main character, a ten-year-old girl, is kidnapped in the middle of the night by jihadists to carry out a suicide attack on a market, but she decides otherwise.
“Terrorists use women. Men get killed, but women are kidnapped, forced into marriage and raped, when young girls are chosen to blow themselves up”
Amina Mamani, Nigerien directorat AFP
female characters
Other films in competition feature female characters, such as Thorns of the Sahel by Burkinabè Boubakar Diallo, a well-known director of African cinema. This fictional feature film testifies to the tenacity of a nurse sent to a camp for internally displaced people who fled the violence, some two million in Burkina. Reality has sometimes caught up with the directors’ fictions. Apolline Traoré confides that she does not have “measured the magnitude of the force” from its main character, to her encounter with women whose lives have been turned upside down by jihadism. “Everything has changed”, she said, especially after the story of a “woman who, with a bullet in the shoulder and two children”, searched for “five days to take refuge”. “Sira is still too small next to these women,” she says.
Boubakar Diallo, for his part, worked with displaced people who, during filming, “panicked when they saw armed soldiers”. It took “to put them in confidence”, explains the one who wanted to tell the jihadist violence, a “essential subject in everyday life” of the Burkinabè. After the Solhan attack in June 2021, the deadliest in the history of Burkina (at least 132 dead), the government did not renew the authorization for the filming of Sira, in the north of the country.
In 20 years of career, Apolline Traoré says she has never had “also afraid to show” a movie. “It’s very sensitive, and fresh in the hearts of Burkinabè and Sahelians”, explains the director.