Dakan - one of 17 feature films from Guinea listed on imdb
{FILM DIARY}
Dakan (Guinea/France, 1997)
Seen: Thursday, 8th April 2010 (cinema, LGBT retrospective)
Runtime: 87′
Director: Mohamed Camara
Production House: Film Du 20ème Créations Cinématographiques
Plot: (from imdb)
Two young high school boys, Manga and Sory, are gay and in love in Guinea. This is their story.
Scene From the Film
Rating: -1 (Disliked It)
Impressions In Short
Interesting because of its novelty and how it portrays Guinean culture, but overall I found it rather tiresome.
More About the Film
IMDb lists 26 films from Guinea of which only 17 are feature films. This film is even more unusual as it openly deals with homosexuality despite being produced by a country in which such activities remain illegal.
Watching something quite this rare is interesting in and of itself, but (as you could have already guessed from IMDb’s statistics) it remains painfully obvious that Guinea does not have a film culture. In terms of how they used the camera, the actors and how they cut their material this was so far behind what most countries produce that it was ridiculous. In terms of actual technique (rather than technology) a lot of the silent movies made at the beginning of the 20th century were way more innovative. Dakan is painfully slow and has jarring continuity errors (like a girl’s dress changing colours between cuts).
This is not to say that the film holds no value, it’s just that the value is only in its content. You get a very good low down on what being gay in Guinea must be like and there’s a lot about the culture of the region also. One gets the feeling that this film is generally very brave in that it broaches the subject of sex at all. Because of social pressures both of the main characters get married eventually and the one whose marriage we follow has a Caucasian girl for a wife, which I assume was because of the sex scene and some mild nudity. It’s not a sexually explicit film by any means, but I certainly got the impression that it went further than Guinea’s normal standards.
Recommended?
Recommended for those interested in its the content, otherwise not really.
