La Tendresse Des Perspectives

The Other

The Tenderness of Perspectives reveals an encounter.

From the very start.

An encounter? Is it an encounter? Really an encounter ? And if we look closer. Maybe yes. Maybe no.

We can see something else: the impossibility of meeting. Which meeting? Precisely. The cross-roads. The return journey to the other is never an easy one. And. In The Tenderness of Perspectives. That is what it’s about. The return journey to the other.

The other. The question the whole question is the other. The one the centre of everything. But this other, this other who is the centre of everything who is he exactly? You? Me? Anyone?

Maybe yes. Maybe no.

In The Tenderness of Perspectives we can tell. Yes we can tell. But to whom?

The other person? The other Africa?

Even if here the other person goes along with the other Africa to finally arrive at this impossibility. For, at in the end, lay this impossibility. Impossibility to run into what we wanted to run into. This thing we desired to run into. To touch this thing we wanted to touch.

Are smiles, handshakes enough to justify a pleasing encounter? No. If you think twice, no. And for good reasons, we never know of if the outside is the mirror of the inside. And I am not sure. Inside could be rotten and outside brilliant. Pretense. Isn’t it that our internet, video game, tv society is reduced to?

What has Africa become today? This question and its questionings question throughout the film. Probably we know we see it day by day on the media that all that’s left of Africa is a desolation of desolation. So a dumping of all the the rubbish from elsewhere. Dirts. Or nearly all. The world is spitting out all its rubbish here. And the detritus of the modern world land in the smallest little villages of the continent. We have even lost our sense of hospitality, caught up by “time is money”. From now on we open our heart to others to be ripped off.

OK OK it is seen and done, that is.

Everywhere

Besides, that’s about all that’s said and done

Everywhere

What is said and done in the Tenderness of Perspectives isn’t seen and done at all elsewhere.Of course there is desolation there is even too much in Africa. Everywhere. Almost. But there is also (and this is what is seen and heard on this film) some enchantment. Landscapes. Beautiful landscapes. Myths…

The desire of this Africa of Drumbeats. Dancing. Singing. Whispering. Kidding. Laughing. The Africa of palm trees Banana trees. Herbs. Trees. Giant trees. Greenery. Waters. Crocodiles. Masks…

It’s a wish to go beyond (what?) the rubbish of the world that lands here to show something other that makes the magic of this film. It is about giving life to this enchanted Africa. Could it be a nostalgia of the great times we try to dissolve in this quest? Maybe. Or not.

A picture of two Africas living side-by-side, an Africa of electric overhead wires, earth-beaten tracks, brick houses, the noise of engines, horns with an enchanted Africa of forests of grasses, trees, greenery, palm-trees, mud-huts, gourds, banana-trees, masks, crocodiles, rocks, waters, laughter, smiles, shouts, drum-beats… can all be seen and heard in this film.

Ghosts are standing on the mountains of trash. Are they the spirits of our ancestors are come to observe the damage and bring help to us ?

The Tenderness of Perspectives transports us simply to the heart of an initiatory search for the Africa of today.

Hakim Bah