SDI Archives

Today is International Women's Day

Women in Bijago culture hold a very important role and are feared by men! They definitely talk louder than men... and very direct. But their role in the villages is still locked to farming, fishing and looking after children.

However, they have a phase in their life around their 20s when they abandon children, husband and family to move into a dedicated female house in order to allow their body to be taken over by male souls in need of purification. Then they can do anything they like except having sex (with men). They go wild dancing and doing mischief. Completely possessed, they have their own language, only understood by other women who went through that phase – and by the sacred drum player. We are talking to one tomorrow.

Anyway, today we remain in town to attend a football game with a difference: The first female football team in Bijago and Guinea-Bissau played to half a dozen admirers.

No matter how experienced you are in documentary filmmaking and all things African – no shoot is like any other. And in particular, this shoot is like no other. Trapped in what has been described a 'closed society' – the Bijagós archipelago – Noé Mendelle struggles to find some sense of balance between traditional and modern influences. When a blog becomes your only place to vent, irony is inevitable. Raw, unfiltered and dispatched on the same day, here is the latest post in her series. 

Cinema on a motorbike

Today we went on filming our sculptor and our canoe maker doing some interesting interviews, but you can catch up with those once the film is finished.

Living up to the Scottish Documetary Institute's philosophy of bringing films everywhere, we did the first-ever cinema screening on the islands of Bijagos. In fact it was the premiere of a film my co-producers Luis and Sana had shot in the villages we are now filming. The idea is to bring back the images to the people who had taken part in that film and also welcomed us in their space.

We had to travel to the village on our motorbike which keeps running out of petrol. Of course we ended up carrying a generator, white sheet, speakers, projector, etc. Most of the people tonight had never seen any moving image, let alone a two-hour film. It was mayhem trying to put up a screen against a house. No nails to fix it!

On unsustainable filmmaking

Today we started filming an old man who is a sculptor specialised in statues embodying spirits. Of course we had to start by selecting the tree, then request for the tree to be cut with the usual ceremony of cloth, palm tree wine, and egg.

Then once again the tree nearly fell on the camera. I'm starting to believe that they have never cut a tree before or Nindo (God) really doesn't approve of this documentary yet!

This is our balance sheet after a few days of shooting:

• Number of trees sacrificed: 3
• Number of eggs thrown at trees: 2
• Number of gallons of aguardiente and palm wine: a lot
• Number of chickens to be sacrificed: 2
• Number of goats to be sacrificed: 1
• Number of taxi drivers sacked: 2 (They keep forgetting to pick us up. Yesterday we had to walk three kilometres carrying equipment on our backs.)

This is what is not known as sustainable filmmaking! However:

• Number of jobs created: 20

Getting to know the village and its inhabitants

Today we went on filming the making of canoe. In no time at all, they transformed this magnificent tree into the shape of the canoe. They worked from early morning till 4pm, only fuelled by Palm wine. Then two women came with a tiny bit of cooked rice. Whatever happened to the 50 kg we bought the previous day? The men grumbled a bit... Not an argument I wanted to get involved in!

The women had to yell a warning when approaching the men's workplace, only allowed to come in with the food when the men said so.

The Bijagós are a matrilineal society, which means that land, animals and children belong to the women. The brothers of a child's mother have authority over the child. As uncles, they effectively become father figures for the children. Women are not heads of villages but they have economical power within the family. They are the providers and the nurturers. Bijagó women choose their husbands and request their hands by cooking a special rice dish. If the man eats it, then they have agreed to matrimony.

Day 4: how to request permission to film

Bubaque is the main island and the capital of the Bijagós, centred around the port. You only get one boat a week linking the Bijagós to the mainland, but slowly the French are developing this lost paradise into a tourist venue. Speed boats are now wheezing around the islands, making the traditional canoe a death trap.

In order for us to travel around the island we rented a motorbike with a trailer at the back. Just enough to fit our small team of five! Of course it keeps breaking down.

Carnival has been going on in full flow for three full days but we resisted the temptation of spending too much time with 'exotic' photography and ventured to the village where we are planning to follow different characters, in order to negotiate (again) permission to film.

No matter how experienced you are in documentary filmmaking and all things African – no shoot is like any other. And in particular, this shoot is like no other. Trapped in what has been described a 'closed society' – the Bijagós archipelago – Noé Mendelle struggles to find some sense of balance between traditional and modern influences. When a blog becomes your only place to vent, irony is inevitable. Raw, unfiltered and dispatched on the same day, here is the latest post in her series. 

Day 3 of travelling

It seems that we are reaching Bubaque, one of the main islands in the archipelago of Bijagós, off the West Coast of Africa. Pitch dark over sea and sky.

It took flights from Edinburgh to Lisbon to Casablanca to Bissau. And then a boat from Bissau that managed to get lost, break down twice, and now has to move against the current. We have been on it for ten hours and still a long way to go!

Tom Allan is a multmedia journalist into environment, social issues, and community. He has worked for the BBC, the Guardian, FSRN, PRI, and Leith FM. This is his account of the masterclass with Michel Wenzer at the Scottish Documentary Institute, originally published on the Radio Doc Blog.

On Friday I attended a sound design masterclass with Swedish film maker and composer Michel Wenzer. Earlier in the week I’d seen Wenzer’s film At Night I Fly at the GFT in Glasgow, as part of the Glasgow Film Festival. Ten years in the making, it depicted life in New Fulsom jail, a super-max prison in California. The film had a particular focus upon a group of prisoners participating in an "Arts in Correction" program.

Michel’s route into filmmaking was unconventional – he has been a truck driver in Bosnia where he began to develop an interest in still photography, taking images of soldiers. Returning to Sweden, he wanted to get more involved in the arts, and he would have gone to art college in New York, but he wasn’t able to afford it. Ultimately he trained as a composer, and sound and music are still central to how he constructs his films, particularly his early shorts about the prisoners, and for this reason I’m going to focus on these in this blog post.

(Continued from part 2.)

Day 4

I want to start the film with the 'wall of shame' as it is known from a beautiful song, as a way to introduce the history of Western Sahara. In order to get there, we had to get permission of the Polisario Protocol Bureau and get a police car escort. I asked Khadra if she would consider coming with us. She immediately accepted and offered that some of her family members join us. That meant two daughters and her son and his wife and a few kids!

They asked me to go and buy camel meat so we could have a picnic in the desert. The two Land Rovers were loaded with pots and pans and meat. It took a 2-hour drive across sand and stone to get there. The police car was driving sometimes at the front, sometimes at the back, trying to foresee danger. It felt like we were in a car chase movie! Meanwhile in our Land Rover, music was blasting out of the speakers and the women were waving their arms in the air and singing along. They have many revolutionary songs with wonderful rhythms. It was impossible to film or take photos, as the car was shaking so much. But I want you to imagine those beautiful, rather large women, with every inch of skin covered but their eyes. And some of them had large black sunglasses. In total disguise, yet having the time of their lives!

(Continued from part 1.)

Day 2

Woke up with the anticipation of visiting Algiers. It is such a beautiful city, built on hills and looking at the sea. People compare it to Marseilles, but actually it is more beautiful. White buildings with beautiful blue iron balcomies. Large pleasant avenues with trees and gardens, and the constant view of the sea. Having a rest from walking through the casbah, we saw that the cinematheque was playing one of my favourite films, Touki Bouki, so we went in. There were four of us! The sound kept breaking down, but it was still pleasurable to see the film on a big screen in Africa.

Time to get to airport, only to discover that we had two seats but bad luck: the pilots were on strike, so we may or may not have a plane... So we waited and waited, and two hours later we were rushed through customs (yes, it seems they can do it) and onto a plane to Tindouf. Our poor fixer Hamdi had been waiting for us there for the last 30 hours.