Ladj Ly, director of the award-winning film at Cannes in 2019 Wretched, and Toumani Sangaré, co-founder in 1995 of the film collective Kourtrajmé (short film in verlan), have just opened a film school in Dakar, Senegal.
They are already fourteen – seven young women and as many men – chosen from hundreds of candidates who will train as screenwriters for five months. Then the school will welcome in June 2022 eighteen apprentice directors.
“We started the course with the question: why do you write?”, says their trainer, screenwriter Dialika Sané. The answers were “very inspiring, sometimes absurd, sometimes poetic”, but all “understood the profession of screenwriter, the very essence of the profession, which is to project on the screen what cannot necessarily be said by other means”.
The school took place in a former professional building converted into a cultural space not far from the heart of the Senegalese capital. “Senegal has become essential in terms of audiovisual production, in particular series, says co-director Toumani Sangaré. Many international productions are filmed there, the technicians are ‘quality’ and the landscapes ‘incredible’, all of this “five hours from Paris” by plane, he explains.
This is the third Kourtrajmé school to open after that of Montfermeil in 2018, then that of Marseille in 2020. Ladj Ly, who spent his childhood in the Bosquets district of Montfermeil, had the dream of giving back what he owed to the poor neighborhoods where he grew up and made his debut by filming the urban violence of 2005 in 365 days in Clichy-Montfermeil.
These Kourtrajmé schools – free – all have the same profession of faith, that of offering free of charge and without condition of diploma or age, training in the cinema and audiovisual professions. The success of Miserables, selected for the Oscars, with its two million admissions did not make us forget its social origins and its links with Africa at Ladj Ly. Born into a family from Mali where he shot the documentary 365 days in Mali (with directors Said Belktibia and Benkoro Sangare), he had long thought of creating schools on the continent with which he has kept strong ties.
Ladj Ly and Toumani Sangaré do not hide the fact that their first African school could have been born in Mali, where they have their roots. The turmoil in which the country is caught did not allow it. But Ladj Ly has a dozen projects “pretty much everywhere” on the continent, “in Mali, in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), in Burkina…” Even in more peaceful Senegal, Ladj Ly and his partners have not had it easy. The period was “complicated with the Covid”. Raising the funds was not easy and bureaucratic red tape hampered the undertaking.
“Notoriety opens a lot of doors, but it’s still an obstacle course to tell yourself that you want to create free schools, open to all.”
Ladj Ly director of the film “Les Miserables”at AFP
Ladj Ly was caught up in February 2021 by an investigation in France for breach of trust and money laundering, targeting the association which oversees the school. He and his brother were interviewed by the police. The investigations have been completed and the prosecution says it is examining the possible follow-up.
For the artist, “the investigation is over”. He speaks of an attempt to “sabotage” and of “foolery” written by a former employee. “Our school, it bothers a lot of people, they did everything to destroy it, he said. The important thing is that the school exists and (that) we continue to open them everywhere.” In Montfermeil, Marseille, Dakar and soon Madrid…