How does a film which takes as its starting point post-colonial Africa end up raising the more general question of the colonisation of minds and bodies by all kinds of "conventions"? And how can the festivities surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of Malian independence in September 2010 supply the material to question the function of rhapsode, the individual who recounts and consequently creates? Because, we do not narrate history with impunity. We decide whether or not to use a certain syntax, a vocabulary, a protocol. The author of Convention opts for the third-person. He decides to place his perspective as a white person - this standard reference that has not finished formatting Africa - at a distance. This is a posture of retreat that does not erase itself, but rather serves as a critical positioning. It is also an attitude of the watchman who captures, under the laws of a kaleidoscopic montage, the different states of the decolonized body. At the crossroads between documentary, self fictionalisation and cinematic poetry, this film assumes its nature as a "form-project". Free, digressive and inventive, it encourages thinking about history without didactics, questions the conditions and consequences of the acquisition of liberty.
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