A few weeks ago, Belgian-Rwandan filmmaker Jonas d’Adesky finished the shoot for Entre-deux (lit. “Jump Ball”), his second feature after having made his feature debut, Twa timoun [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], in true guerrilla fashion upon leaving film school. That film, made completely on the fly, followed the daily lives of three young children on the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

With Entre-deux, he is trying his hand at a more traditional form of filming and production. In it, he follows the journey of Lia, a mixed-race Rwandan woman in the twilight years of her professional basketball career. One day, the coach of Rwanda’s national team suggests she be selected with a view to taking part in the African championship. She heads off to Rwanda, a place she hasn’t been back to since she was nine years old, when she was forced to flee the genocide. This return rekindles her memories of the past and will turn her life totally upside down.

This quest for identity is toplined by Franco-Rwandan actress-director Sonia Rolland, who has appeared in many television productions, and for whom this represents her first major film role after Désordres [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (2012). Having been a basketball player in her youth, she is thus returning to the court as well as to the country of her birth, Rwanda. She is mainly flanked by Rwandan non-professional actors, in addition to Jean-Hughes Anglade (whom we glimpsed this year in The Deep Dark and Vaincre ou mourir).

The film takes the form of a road movie as it looks into various issues related to being of mixed race, which forge Lia’s identity. It also broaches family secrets and the way in which silence shapes the present. Furthermore, it aspires to enrich representations of modern-day Rwanda, 30 years after the genocide, and to paint a portrait of an extremely dynamic country that embraces the present and is bristling with creativity.

Entre-deux is being produced in Belgium by Aurélien Bodinaux, for Néon Rouge Production, which recently co-produced the documentary Downstream to Kinshasa [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Congolese helmer Dieudo Hamadi. Neon Rouge has a long track record of producing and co-producing with Africa, having also staged The Mercy of the Jungle [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Joël Karekezi
scheda film] by Joel Karekezi, which was presented at Toronto, won the Golden Stallion at the Ouagadougou Panafrican Festival in 2019 and scooped four awards at the African Movie Academy Awards, including Best Film. It just so happens that the Belgian outfit is reuniting with its partner Tact Productions in France for this new project, and is also teaming up with Karekezi Productions, a company set up by filmmaker Joel Karekezi in Rwanda. The film has received backing from the Film Commission of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.