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musician Rajery was running music therapy sessions at the hospital,” recounts Laza. “I was ashamed that he was doing more for my cousin than me, and I wanted to get involved too.” The resulting documentary —


which is shot and in post-production — captures the lives of the patients at the hospital through Rajery’s music therapy sessions. As founder of Madagascar’s only


film festival, Rencontres du Film Court, Laza is a key figure in the country’s fragile cinema scene. The director trained at France’s La


Femis cinema school in Paris but returned home before completing his graduation fi lm due to political unrest on the Indian Ocean island in 2006. “I thought long and hard about whether I should return to France. In the end I decided to stay and set up the film festival to try to get things moving here,” says Laza.


Pieces Of Lives marks Laza’s fea-


ture-length documentary debut after a series of well-travelled shorts including 6h58 and Meme Instant De Vie. Laza is keen to complete the doc- umentary this autumn and then focus his attention on a fi rst feature- length fiction — the provisionally entitled La Légende De Zazarano, a contemporary thriller set in a small fi shing town.


The President Cameroon


Dir/prod Jean-Pierre Bekolo


Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s The President (Le Président) explores the potential for a revolution in his native Cam- eroon through the fi gure of a fi cti- tious president who disappears temporarily. The screenplay by Paris-based writer and academic Simon Njami


is loosely inspired by the mysterious 40-day absence from Cameroon of president Paul Biya last summer, which prompted calls by pro- democracy campaigners for an Arab Spring-style uprising. Mixing fact and fiction, Bekolo


plans to present a series of vignettes based on true events that suggest the country is ripe for an uprising after 30 years of presidential rule by Biya.


“I am talking about real people in


Cameroon and real history but the president is fi ctitious even though he is inspired by one dimension of Paul Biya,” explains Bekolo. The “real people” will include


17-year-old Vanessa Tchatchou who hit the headlines in Cameroon ear- lier this year. Tchatchou’s baby girl disappeared just a few hours after her birth, revealing the existence of a child-trafficking ring involving high-ranking offi cials. Another episode captures the


efforts of local dissident Mboua Massock to destroy a statue of the late French Marshal Philippe Leclerc, who was governor of Cam- eroon before leaving to fight the Axis forces in Africa during the Sec- ond World War. “The fi lm is about leaving power.


Jean-Pierre Bekolo


That’s one of the biggest problems of Africa, leaders that don’t realise when it’s time to go,” says Bekolo.


» www.screendaily.com August 2012 Screen International 7 n


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