Cinema
Ilo tsy very
Solo Ignace Randrasana · 1987
Synopsis
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, victorious France tends its wounds, but in its colonies the peoples demand their freedom. In 1947, the Malagasy rise up; the insurrection is crushed and claims thousands of victims. Koto, a child still at the age of dreams, has survived this disaster and tells of what his people endured, whose history the film traces back to the conquest of the island at the end of the nineteenth century.
Context
The film was co-produced by the Malagasy Ministry of Arts and Revolutionary Culture, with the Malagasy Film Office, and by the Algerian state production company, which sent twenty-four professionals and equipment; Smaïl Lakhdar-Hamina operated the camera. Shot on professional-format film stock, it mixes documentary and fiction. According to his eldest son, who was an assistant on the shoot, the author refused to attend the premiere, at the Soa cinema in September 1987, because the government had designated the Office as the Algerians' interlocutor in his place; the Minister of Culture had to ask him to come. Mémoires de Madagascar has restored it with the support of the Amiens festival.
Who it is for
In Malagasy and French, subtitled in French in the restored copy; from seventy-five to one hundred minutes depending on the copies.
Prizes and reception
First Malagasy feature film devoted to the uprising of 1947, and the first film of the island shot in thirty-five millimetre.
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