Screening of Dreams of Dust will take place April 9, 2010 at The Baobab Cultural Center. Click her for more information and to RSVP.

Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust) is a stationary quest, the interior journey of a character who finds himself by going away to lose himself. It is a simple story of letting go of one’s ego The characters are castaways from the shipwreck of life. marooned in a gold mine where everything seems possible but nothing is achieved. Happiness is too far away, out of reach. They are all carrying a burden: a heavy past, a child on their back or a sack of stones. In this way they all echo the main character, Mocktar Dicko, who arrives carrying a suitcase but also the guilt he feels for the death of his little girl. Essakane is a makeshift gold mine located in the far north of Burkina Faso. It is the perimeter of the film. This space anchors the story line. It is the setting for a contradictory atmosphere, a mixture of hope and despair. “Sahel” is a word of Arabic origin meaning “shoreline”. On this shore, Essakane seemed to be a kind of port, where people dream in vain of setting off for happiness. The characters contemplate the vast desert as others might look at the sea. They live according to their own rhythm, with a predilection for suspended moments, for all the floating seconds where it seems everything can still change. In some ways, styles of cinematography can be defined as much by what one shows as much as what one refrains from showing. In, Rêves de poussière, I went for a very pared-down form, with no sophisticated framing or camera movements, by simplifying the actors’ gestures, so as to distribute glances and telling pauses within the dialogues. The work on colour was very significant, but it took on meaning by bleeding much of the colour out. The same applies to the soundtrack and music. We were facing the void to express the characters’ inner worlds: closed in an endless space whose bars were wind and dust, they became prisoners of themselves. Only the faraway horizon lets a few mirages appear from time to time, a few impossible dreams.