A Single Word (Une Simple Parole)

And here we are on Tuesday. I walked here throug the Kensington Market neightborhood, a vibrant mix of tiny ethnic shops, porches a street scene.  A guy running for local election was pimping his friendship with the last Jane Jacobs, who moved here after writing her book...

A Single Word: a woman in Senegal travels into the countryside, to the family farm, to visit with her grandmother, and films it all.  That's it. The woman was Mariama Sylla, who passed away before the film was finished. Her sister, Khady Sylla, finished the film.

One of the concerns of the two sisters was the creation of a record of this vanishing way of life. After their journey on the road, after their arrival in the village, I get the impression they're careful to keep any shots of cars or modern technology out of the camera, even though I think I could hear them driving by on the nearby highway.  They show us the women of the village preparing millet the same old way, with a pounding stick and a big wooden container.  They show us a man clearing his field with a simple hoe, he had been working as a driver in the city but came back to the farm because working a farm is simple and dignified and farms are the backbone of the country.  They show us Mariama talking to her grandmother about their relations, and who has died, and who's had children, and refreshing Mariama's memory about her ancestors.

Another of the Sylla's concerns was how the written word is driving out the spoken word. We don't listen as hard now that we can write things down, we don't trouble to remember things when we know we can look it up later. There's a value in speaking directly to someone that is greater than the information passed between the people.

The climate of terror being what it is today, Khady Sylla wasn't able to make through all the layers of bureaucracy to get to the U.S. to speak at the showing--she had the plane tickets and the U.S. visa, but there was a missing link in one of the countries where she would have to change planes. But she had a prepared message that the film festival programmer read us.  It had to do with Khady's desire for "Peace through words", and the hope that talking to each other and the relization of the power of words could help bring more peace to the world.

The film had a languid pace, obviously, but somehow I wasn't bored watching it at all.  The colors were beautiful, and the scenery and the place mundane yet exotic.  It was fascinating to watch, and the whole  thing spoke of real, human relationships and sincere communications.  And I found the film to be just the right length, 63 minutes.  So it was tightly edited. Much longer I think and I would have been getting impatient.

There's an intellectual exercise you may have heard of, that one can apply to a film, the Bechdel Test. To pass the test you have to be able to say these three things about the film:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

A Single Word definitely passes that test. It's one of the very few I've seen at the festival that do.  It's all women, women talking to each other about whatever. There's the one scene of the man clearing his field with a hoe pontificating to the camera about the importance of farming, but I think that was the single male presence on screen.  Interesting.

A lot of the times they're speaking French to each other, besides that they're speaking Wolof, the language of Senegal.  There was a charming translation of what they do to millet to prepare it for cooking: they "plunder millet".  I like that. That's what you do to a plant when you eat it as food, you plunder the nutritional value from it.  And it's a logical translation--the French word I heard them speak was "pillage," I'm pretty sure.