Sarraounia

SARRAOUNIA is a rare species of film in the history of African cinema. Although numerous projects existed that sought to celebrate African resistance to European colonial conquest, African cinema’s dependence on the political economy of its former colonizers has for the most part made this aspiration nearly impossible. The film owes much of its existence to Thomas Sankara, the former head of state of Burkina Faso who, upon learning of Hondo’s difficulties in Niger, offered to let him shoot the film in Burkino Faso and put technicians, actors and the Burkinabe army at his disposal.
By adapting Abdoulaye Mamani’s eponymous book, Hondo choseto make an epic of one page of the great encyclopedia of African resistance against colonialism. Following the notorious 1884-85 Berlin conference, European countries engaged in a collective assault on the African continent in order to take over its lands and resources, thereby inaugurating the age of catastrophe. Headed for Lake Chad in Central Africa, the infamous and bloodthirsty Voulet Chanoine French military expedition, which is seeking to enact a French version of the British Cape-to-Cairo imperial fantasy, crosses paths with the indomitable and incomparable strategist Queen Sarraounia of the Azna, who bravely resists their incursion.