Ivoire Cinéma @ Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara: Carl-Edouard Keïta
The idea came from the fact that I believe there is always something that inhabits us internally, something that overlaps with reality and maintains a certain relationship with our upbringing, the education we received. This education can have a deeply defining impact on us. In a way, one can become a prisoner of it. We are educated from a very young age, and when we reach adulthood, we try to free ourselves from that education and its weight in order to take control of our own lives; yet often, that education continues to hold us back. Two worlds then overlap within you, and this is the aspect that greatly interested me in my films.
Timité Bassori, on the films On the Dune of Solitude (1964) and The Woman with the Knife (1969) — Interview conducted by Marie-Hélène Banimbadio Tusiama and Carl-Edouard Keïta in February 2025.
The first Ivorian films made after independence, between the 1960s and 1970s, exist in an in-between space. Boundaries between the real and the supernatural, Africa and the West, as well as between different social classes, are constantly crossed. Through these narratives, filmmakers sought to define the contours of an emerging Ivorian identity — hybrid and shaped by multiple influences. Their works thus offer a striking portrait of new forms of sociability and romantic relationships emerging within a society in the midst of construction.
The first part of the exhibition, curated by Léa Barron and Marie-Hélène Banimbadio and dedicated to the period spanning from 1960 to 1972, brings together a selection of films by Timité Bassori, Désiré Écaré, Henri Duparc, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala. A second section, conceived in collaboration with the MuCAT team, explores the following decades through a selection centered on the works of filmmakers Fadika Kramo Lanciné and Philippe Lacôte.
Removed from their original contexts and presented together for the first time, these films trace an unprecedented image of Ivorian modernity. Within them emerge the contours of both a national identity and a memory that is at once collective and intimate, whose echoes continue to resonate today. Indeed, the concerns of their characters, the tensions between tradition and modernity, social transformations, and individual aspirations remain profoundly contemporary. Rather than considering these films as mere archives bearing witness to a bygone era, the exhibition proposes to reactivate them through a dialogue with contemporary artistic creation by Ivorian artists based in Abidjan and across the diaspora. It explores the ways in which cinema, like art, enables us to traverse boundaries between dimensions, spaces, and temporalities. By placing these productions in dialogue, the exhibition seeks to reveal the fractures and continuities that run through Ivorian cultural history. Understanding this cinematic past appears essential in order to grasp contemporary possibilities, without either idealizing or sanctifying it. Contemporary works thus resonate with the practice of these pioneers, extending their questions and situating these discussions within a historical perspective in relation to our present.
