Director: Heidi Specogna, colour, 123 min., 2016
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This long-term observation set in the Central African Republic will arouse anger and sadness in all viewers. A simple notebook serves as the starting point: on its pages, around 300 women, girls and men describe what was done to them by the mercenaries that Jean-Pierre Bemba, the then President of the neighboring country of Congo, sent into the CAR. Bemba is now a defendant at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The notebook could serve as important evidence – not least because for the first time rape is being recognized as a war crime in The Hague. But even as the hearing is underway, the next war breaks out in the Central African Republic – and the victims of the past must suffer once more.
Heidi Specogna forgoes all analytical ambitions: the chaos is not only too extensive, but the developments of the Central African Republic likewise shaped by too many terrible surprises. Any attempt at analysis would have made the documentary abstract, and been at the expense of the people, whom the director captures on film with admirable courage while ignoring the very dangerousness of the shoot. Her documentary is about human suffering, not political developments. And when documenting the horrors, Heidi Specogna does not spare viewers the sight of the dead, a problematic that she and her cameraman consciously confront: at one point there are two corpses on a road, and while other people keep their distance, the camera "approaches the dead step by step. (...) All viewers can see early enough what's coming, and can decide for themselves whether they follow along or turn away and spare themselves. We wanted to give them the room for both choices."
The "Cahier Africain", the African notebook, appears to be one of the few dependable constants to be found in this documentary – alongside the recognition that nothing in this country is as dependable as the continuity of the wars. One warlord follows another, one president after the next. Anything that initially seems to give grounds for hope always proves itself to be fallacious.
Heidi Specogna
Heidi Specogna was born in 1959 in Biel (Switzerland). From 1982 to 88, she studied at the DFFB – German Film and Television Academy Berlin, where she made her first short films. Since founding her own production firm in 1991, she has made numerous documentary films. Political topics, above all in relation to Latin America and Africa, are of a particular focus. Heidi Specogna has also been an instructor of documentary filmmaking at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg since 2003.
Cahier Africain has been awarded the German Film Award for Best Documentary, the 2016 German Human Rights Film Award, and a Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig (International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film).
Filmography (selected)
1984 Fährten (Tracks)
1988 Dschibuti (Djibouti)
1996 Tupamaros
2003/04 Zeit der roten Nelken (An Age of Red Carnations)
2011 Carte Blanche
2013/14 Pepe Mulica – Der Präsident (Lessons from the Flowerbed)
2016 Cahier Africain
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