THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Rewind to the 8th IFFK in the year 2003. Festival regulars would clearly remember Moussa Sena Absa from Senegal, his traditional Senagalese attire and the long brown pipe. He created a ripple wherever he went and the shopkeepers at Thampanoor would remember him distributing little orange notes of Rs 20 to anyone and everyone who asked for it.
So this time around, someone coming from Moussa’s country itself was excitement. That he was a musician whose album African Dream was in the Top 40 hits in England for a long time added a certain restlessness to the excitement. Wasis Diop, came to the IFFK with the films made by his dear brother Djibril Diop Mambety, who was three years older to him. Mambety’s films were screened in the retrospective section.
Wasis, who has done the music for most of Djibril’s films, feel that the films have an intimate relationship with the maker. ‘’You see his dreams, you see his nightmares, the fear, the deep thought processes and despair as well,’’ said Wasis, who even acted in the lead role for his brother’s film ‘Badou Boy’ that was again screened at the festival.
Djibril Diop Mambety was a filmmaker with strong clear storytelling narratives and confronted post-independant Africa’s complexities and contradictions. He was labelled a rebel there, and here in Kerala, film-makers and film students refer to him affectionately as the ‘John Abraham of African cinema’.
Wasis was Djibril’s artistic collaborator and also wrote the soundtrack for ‘Hyenas’ and three other films. So how was it, working for his brother, we ask. ‘’Oh, it was not an easy job. My brother was not a musician, but had his own ideas. He was very clear of what he wanted. I never wanted to disappoint him, and at times I have worked in a different way. Sometimes I had to go for little tweaks here and there but he was always happy with the end result,’’ said Wasis.
The two brothers were pretty close to each other right from childhood, but when their parents separated, they had to live separately at either end of the town, seperated by a railway track. This railway line in the town of Colobane in Senegal is what you see in the film Hyenas.
‘’I lived with my mother and he lived with father. So we would run across to each other after school and there would be this train chugging down and we would have to wait..and the wait seemed endless,’’ Wasis recollected.
The two grew up on Indian Bollywood films, and Indian music. Wasis would say music came to Africa from across the seas. A brilliant musician who dared to experiment with a variety of music such as Japanese, Jamaican, West African and Indian, Wasis said he liked ancient traditional Chinese music the best.
A Paris-based magazine Le Matin observed that Diop ‘’strikes a balance between the songs of a hallucinating Muslim priest calling back his flock and the ageless gentle storyteller of the Savannah’’. Diop’s inspiration has been a French singer of the 12th century, Hildegarde Von Bingen, who he said, had a very spirited voice, strong and powerful.
While music is inherent in him, Wasis Diop wants to take over what his brother left behind, films. Wasis recently directed his own first short film, a surreal impressionistic portrayal of Djibril’s close friend, the Senegalese artist Joe Ouakam. Reviews said echoes of Djibril could be felt throughout the film.
Years ago, Djibril had desperately wanted to come to Kerala to present his work before the festival audience, but could not, because he was already very ill. Wasis is here, but why is this colourful personality not seen at the venues? ‘’Oh, Kerala reminds me of Senegal. The sights, the sounds, the blaring of horns, and the weather, I feel so much at home that I just feel like staying in the room,’’ laughed Diop, who is now settled in France.
Lets hope Wasis, who makes four trips a year to Senegal for inspiration, will be inspired enough with Kerala to make a full-length feature film soon.