Alidou, a Beninese musician, wonders about the Gèlèdè rite and more particularly about what his mother called “the secret of women”. He travels to Sagon, a voodoo village in Benin, at the heart of this society run by a woman called Iyalashè. Sharing the daily life of the villagers, he goes from meeting to meeting trying to better understand the meaning of these beliefs involving the cult of witch mothers, the Iyas. His quest for identity will be the way to measure the impact of modernity on traditional practices. The challenges of the film is a creative documentary, but also a heritage film highlighting the Beninese cultural exception. The Gèlèdè was classified as an intangible heritage by Unesco in 2001 and its masks will always be a showcase for the whole country. However, the film underlines that there is a risk of folklorization of the rite due to “modernity”. This issue has resulted in a growing rural exodus and a desacralization of traditional practices. It is not a question here of denigrating this modernity which is undeniably in certain aspects a progress for the villagers, but indeed through this film to fix a moment which serves as a duty of memory for future generations. I wanted to put Alidou's point of view at the center of my film; through his journey, he meets characters who agree to talk to him about Gèlèdè and share a little of their knowledge. Through its quest for identity, the film takes the form of chronicles of a village in the center-east of Benin revealing the daily life of its inhabitants through the spirituality that guides them. He thus presents the religious aspect of Gèlèdè through the eyes of a Beninese who sets out to discover his own culture, but also his maternal heritage. Exploring a voodoo rite involves things not said and things not seen. I therefore endeavored to respect the will of the religious authorities by not ignoring their recommendations. Nevertheless, I wanted these secrets to remain readable by the spectators. My goal is to present this voodoo cult not vis-à-vis the fear it inspires but through what it unifies.
The film is a real collaborative project since we worked almost ten years with the communities of the voodoo Gèlèdè rite to bring our project to fruition. Moreover, the writing of the film was done in close collaboration with the initiates of the cult in order to get as close as possible to their reality. Collaborative also since our team is Franco-Beninese and the very principle of my approach is inspired by the shared anthropology initiated by Jean Rouch. Over the years, French cinema professionals (Benoit Rizzotti, Damien Mandouze) have come to train Beninese technicians to prepare them for filming and form an independent team for future filming. Now that the film is ready to be broadcast, we went to show the film where we had shot, in the village of Sagon, but also in the big cities of Benin. After each screening, the Beninese members of the team led a debate on the theme “Traditions and modernity”. It was a question of initiating a discussion on the risks of cultural standardization and on the interest of defending the Beninese cultural exception.
Director's Bio
Trained at the documentary workshop of the School of La Femis, Cyrill Noyalet has been working for ten years with the Nago-Yorouba communities of central Benin. Its technical team is mixed (Franco-Beninese), made up of professional technicians from a Beninese theater troupe and French professionals. This interaction is a principle on which the director bases his work.
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