Shown in the 32nd Astra Film Festival’s New Voices Competition after a world premiere in Paris’ Cinéma du Réel Festival, French director Aminatou Echard’s The Big Everything might seem to focus on the exoticism of Nigerien sorcerers and genies (spirits), but it actually does a great deal more. Mixing the present and the past, the documentary explores race, colonialism, mistrust, history and memory in a compelling and memorable “big everything”.

The star of the documentary is Nicole Echard, the director’s now deceased mother who worked as an anthropologist, researching the beliefs and traditions of Nigerien tribes. Having accompanied her when she was a child, the director now returns to Niamey and uses her mother’s footage and letters as a lens to better understand the differences and animosity between whites and blacks, Europeans and Africans, men and women, and even between different generations.

The result is intriguing, for The Big Everything is more preoccupied with feelings and atmosphere than with facts. Individual viewers will react differently to the movie; a few might even reject it, but there are countless little nuggets of wisdom spread throughout its (rather long) duration of close to two hours. Aided by her mother by way of her journals, and by her father who brings his own perspective on his wife’s work into the present, Echard speaks about meaning and value, bringing to mind the famous proverb that “one person’s garbage is another’s treasure”. From an anthropological point of view, the footage we see on screen is invaluable, showing Nigeriens from decades ago performing “possession” dances according to the Bori beliefs which state that spirits roam freely among people and occasionally possess them. But, regardless of their value, these recordings are at risk if younger generations or ignorant minds simply see them as trivial.

More generally speaking, the documentary probes meaning and how difficult it might be to understand it. But it also examines how certain conditions must be met in order to access it, much like a priceless painting that doesn’t mean much if observed from too close or too far a distance, or in too dark a setting.

The documentary is a love letter to knowledge and preserving history. Some people can date their genealogy back for centuries while others can only trace back recent generations. But what if we don’t have any mementos from our ancestors - no pictures, letters or recordings? What if we don’t even have stories about them and they simply vanish into nothing when they die? Although the Nigerien men and women shown in the documentary at times suggest they don’t truly trust Nicole Echard’s work - or at least her intentions - because of her “Frenchness” and “whiteness”, there’s respect in their words, as they see her as a wise woman who has helped preserve elements of local history, with hundreds of Nigeriens from the 1970s and 1980s kept alive through the films she shot and the audiotapes she recorded.

The Big Everything was also screened in Astra’s “#Westerners – A Critical View” sidebar, alongside Arjun Talwar’s Letters from Wolf Street [+leggi anche:
recensione
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scheda film]. Watching Echard’s work, we’re compelled to scrutinise certain viewpoints which, despite initial impressions, aren’t actually valid. We might consider, for example, that only one third of the world’s population celebrates Christmas or that the term “Middle East” is colonial, having only been devised to differentiate between Britain’s African and Indian colonies. And in one of the documentary’s most memorable moments, we hear that “being white intrinsically means having power”, a statement which would be very hard to disprove.

The Big Everything was produced by Survivance (France) and Naoko Films (Belgium).