Ladj Ly, the director of miserable, award-winning film at Cannes in 2019, and Toumani Sangaré, also a founding member of the Kourtrajmé film collective, have chosen Dakar in Senegal to launch their third free Kourtrajmé film school, the first in Africa.
Fourteen students thus began the course of the “scenario” session on Monday January 17 at the Trames cultural space. They will train for five months, before the second “production” session which will begin next June with 18 apprentices. Out of approximately 800 applications received, these seven men and seven women were selected after presenting a script.
They all come from very different backgrounds. For example, Kiné Niang, a 30-year-old Senegalese, holds a master’s degree in statistics and econometrics from the University of Dakar. “I have always been passionate about everything that was writingshe explains. When I saw that the Kourtrajmé school was going to open its doors, I was doing an internship as a community manager. But I haven’t finished.”
“I made a choice between the career and here. It was a dream and a passion. I also know it was a chance.”
Kiné Niang, student at the Kourtrajmé schoolat franceinfo
At the end of the five months of training, the goal is to write two short film scripts and a television series pilot. They will then be taken over in June by the 18 apprentice directors to put them on screen by December 2022.
The first school was opened in Montfermeil in the Paris region by Ladj Ly. In 2020, it is in Marseille that the second school was born. For the director, it is very important that these schools remain free, with no qualifications or age limit. “The ambition of this school is to train this new generation in cinema professions because we all know that access to film schools is complicated, they are expensive. You need to have a minimum level of education. With this school, we wanted to break the codes”, underlines Ladj Ly.
The idea was first to open a school in Mali but the security crisis forced them to find another country. And Senegal imposed itself naturally, explains Toumani Sangaré, Franco-Malian director and director of the school in Dakar. “Today, Senegal has become essential in terms of audiovisual production, in particular series. It also hosts a lot of international filming compared to other countries in the sub-region, which makes it possible to have a quality of technicians . It seemed logical to come to Dakar.”
Very soon will open schools in Guyana and Madrid. And ten other projects are underway in French-speaking Africa such as Mali or Côte d’Ivoire.