a Black man watches another Black man speak on a TValr

Le président

Introduction by Jean-Pierre Bekolo & Lilia Kilburn
Directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo.
With Massam A. Biroko, Gérard Essomba, Max Essouma.
Cameroon/Germany, 2013, DCP, color, 63 min.
French with English subtitles.
DCP source: Weltfilm

How do you know when it's time to leave? This is one of the questions raised by Jean-Pierre Bekolo's forth feature film, shot in Cameroon, a country ruled for over forty years by Paul Biya. In this film Bekolo also analyzes the congruent relationship between the media and political power in order to question, in the form of a satirical film, the meaning of democratic political representation in the context of contemporary Cameroon. (For instance, pay attention to the TV show footage included in wider shots.) With his signature mixing of codes and genres, Bekolo portrays here a fictitious president with dark glasses, imbued with power. Unsurprisingly, the film was censored by the Cameroonian authorities when it was released in 2013. Yet being president is not a divine gift, and "being the son of a president not enough to become one," as the rapper, political activist and exile Valsero, who appears in the film, reminds us.

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