Le Cercle des noyés

The circle of the drowned is the name given to black political prisoners in Mauritania – imprisoned in the 1980s after campaigning for equal rights for the oppressed black population, they were moved over 1,200 kilometres to a remote fort in Oualata, where they were held for 6 years. Ba Fara was amongst them. With Belgian director Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, he relates one of the darkest chapters in Mauritania’s modern history. The story is told in his native Fula, chronicling the life the prisoners shared. There is no humiliation from which they were spared. Forced labour, torture, starvation and disease punctuated the years spent in isolation from the outside world. Now released, Ba Fara passes his former captors in the street, without a glimmer of recognition, “almost as if none of this ever happened”. The monochrome images filmed by Vandeweerd are a hauntingly austere echo to this sobering and moving tale, recreating the sense of violence of the time. They take us to the very limit of human solitude, to the desert, to imprisonment without hope. (DOK.fest München)