Au Revoir Mandima
Director: Robert-Jan Lacombe
Switzerland-Zaire, 2010
11 minutes
Looking at an old photograph taken on the day of his family's departure from Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the early 1980s, a narrator is flooded with memories of a long-forgotten childhood in Africa. As the camera moves slowly over every corner of this frozen-in-time image, the voice takes us to a world of tangible sensations, friendships ruptured and innocence los. The faces seem to come alive, the leaves to move and the sun to set on a world gone forever. The sad ghosts of the exiled settlers linger, like that of teacher Chris Marker, who understood better than anyone that photography is a witness to death: the death of childhood.