After Même le vent, Laurence Attali continues to explore her intimate relation with Africa, and Senegal in particular. After language and meeting people, she deals with a more interior dimension here: that of the Word, the resonance of the Word. Or should we say « dares », as this takes courage. In delving deeper, she quite simply risks missing her objective through presumption or superficiality. This is not the case at all, however, and the filmmaker affirms the sensitivity and poetic restraint that gives all her films their force. On the contrary, Baobab is astonishing from start to end. By setting her film in the year of the Sopi – the change that brought Abdoulaye Wade to power in Senegal – she combines mythology and current affairs. Whilst in the past she did not see the need to pierce a mystery that does not reveal itself, the resonance of current affairs helps her better to understand the country through its emblem, the baobab. She has to « lose her pertinence and impertinence » to do so. Through the subjective camera she is thus able to get to know this country, to try to understand it, in order ultimately to draw her own meaning from reality, a meaning to life.
///Article N° : 5599
