Ben is a pilot and repairman of kwassa-kwassa, traditional fishing boats of the Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean divided by a violent border inherited from colonisation. Like in the Mediterranean, many risk their lives in the attempted crossing from Anjouan to Mayotte, the archipelago’s only island that remains French today. To escape misery, Ben abandoned fishing to become a people smuggler. In this shadowy enterprise, he does his best to stick to his ethics and ensure his passengers’ safety. This is the trade he is passing on, in the dead of night, to Patron. To escape a conviction, Ben has no other choice than to make of this child a “commander”, as he is too young to be put in prison. Koropa plays out this silent rite of passage, this solemn apprenticeship, the transmission of a know-how that owes as much to deceit as to the art of piloting a hostile ocean. With its short and radical form, its abstract space, Koropa escapes the documentary form to produce a classical drama in which two silent figures, those of father and son, two bodies share a perilous journey on the brink of the land of the dead, navigating a ghost-haunted ocean. A crossing that awakens memories of many others, in a world where seas arise as borders and tombs. (Olivier Marboeuf)
Shindzuani with English subtitles
