Upstream - S2E10.5: Saloum

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Welcome... to Da Cerebral Hour as we discuss the Senegalese Southern/terror Saloum. But we are not alone on this venture, as joining us is Author and certified Gambian, ML Kejera!  ------ THE WINTER OF CONTENT The UCU has a fighting fund that you can contribute to here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund If you do feel you have money to spare, please consider supporting your local food banks with money or time! donate to the Trussell Trust here: https://www.trusselltrust.org/make-a-donation/ or the Independent food aid network here: https://www.foodaidnetwork.org.uk/donate There are several ongoing strike funds that could do with some donations, and several can be found here: https://www.cwu.org/ Additionally, please consider joining a renter's union like ACORN, as rising mortgage rates will surely result in rising rent, here: https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/join ------ Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------   *WEB DESIGN ALERT*  Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/   Kill James Bond is hosted by Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com and https://twitter.com/killjamesbond  

You will die with us. to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I'm Alex Gordok-Elley, joined as always by my friends, Abigail Thorne and Devin. And we got a guest. We got Emil Kajara on. Hello. Author, published in The Nation, LA Review of Books. Too qualified for this podcast.

Yeah, we were saying before we started, Emil, you're the most legit guest we've ever had. Like, why are you here? Because Devin's my friend. And when a friend asks you on a pod, it's kind to, you know, just hop on. And more importantly... When a friend asks you on a pod it's kind to you know just hop on and when a friend asks you on a pod you say no i'm busy you say yeah sure and then you never get around to it but this is trash this is for hogs

i'm also a long-time listener like i i i love james bond uh listeners i'm i'm an african i'm from the gambia uh a country that shouldn't exist but uh the british had other ideas sorry yeah it was one of one of his lesser known operations but but we brought you on because devon picked a good film for us to watch for a chance this well i didn't even really pick this. This was introduced to me by ML. And I went, holy shit, this is so good. We need to talk about this on Kill James Bond.

However, it would be completely impossible to do this without a guest that knows what's up. So, things being as they are, they all just sort of knitted together. Yeah, absolutely. We watched Jean-Luc Albalard's saloon uh which is how do we describe this movie going into it uh he builds it as a southern like a global southwestern right yes exactly i thought it was a very odd direction for the oss sandi set franchise to go well they made an oss sandi set movie like the third, like, the third one, set in Africa, which is...

Oh, I have some thoughts about that movie. Where in Africa is it set? I think it's meant to be, like... Like a thinly fictionalized Congo, I believe. Oh, okay, okay. Interesting. Yeah, no, so... We watched Saloon, which... I came to this through, because everything is cable now, right?

So you have to pay for little Amazon Prime subsubscriptions with ads. I got this through Amazon Prime's Shudder thing, which is for horror. And I immediately felt, like, a bit aggrieved by this, because, first of all, like, that's vastly limiting the distribution it's going to get, and second of all, it, like, limits your expectations going in. Because this is, I would place this movie in a similar sort of thing as, like, High Plains Drifter, or a much worse movie, which I also am probably going to talk about in the course of this episode, Bone Tomawk in being it's like a western but it's got horror elements at the same time so the and if you go into it from this is the horror

channel you know yeah which is fascinating because the the director uh here below and the producer pamela job they were talking about they don't see they don't see it as a horror to them it's a terror which is just a little uh detailed difference that I found fascinating. Because, not to spoil too much for the listeners, but there are spirits in the film. And the spirits themselves aren't protective spirits in the real actual belief of the people there. So it would feel a bit odd to call them a horrific thing where it's like the terror you have for deities, for spirits,

kind of like that. I was in an AMC show where it's about a British exploratory group in the Arctic or something. Yeah, exactly. Right. Oh yeah. And that's,

and that is obviously about indigenous belief too. And like the creature that is based off indigenous belief. So it kind of made sense to me of like, that's why this is called a terror, because there is something, there is a little... For sure. You're feeling like awe, I guess. So we begin with a little narration which tells us that revenge is like a river, a river whose bottom was reached only when we drown, which is nice, sets up things nicely, and then... Hardcore. Yeah.

We go to Bissau, in Guinea-Bissau, south of Senegal and The Gambia, where there has been a coup d'etat, we're informed. The military is therefore cracking down on drug traffickers and the result is a pile of bodies through which we see three pairs of shoes proceed in time this movie loves shoes yeah which i really like about the direction in this bit like the shaky cam is so good right yeah and the way the music syncs up with their steps especially especially, I thought, I actually started dancing when I first saw this. When the song was really good. Yeah, the song is Malembe.

I kind of sat back in my chair and I was like, oh, this is going to be an actual good film. What a change. I only ever get to see bad films for this podcast. bad films for this podcast um but yeah so we we see three mercenaries wearing actually really cool sort of like capes like ponchos yeah they've they've already killed everyone there um and they are distributing these like death cards it's like a pack of playing cards with a hyena motif on the back um we see one of them insanely sick I'm always doing this, I'm always leaving Kill James Bond cards on my victims. Oh yeah, absolutely. And we see one of them blow powder into the face of a soldier and knock him unconscious, and we're immediately setting up, okay, these guys are cool, they're deadly, also one of them is magic? Great.

also one of them is magic great um and they they kick in the door and they capture although as we later see rescue a drug trafficker uh along with a case full of gold bars also the case has a has a specter octopus on it which is yeah yes it does yeah and it's a little bit of a scene from tarantino where just uh looking at the gold and the director erbilo lists tarantino as one of his influences when he was younger of like specifically of i could i saw that people who weren't rich could make films which is like i guess that's part of tarantino's backstory right like he's a bit of an underdog figure yeah for sure this this did make me think of tarantino but in kind of a different way in that i saw the influence right um but i also thought this is

exactly the kind of movie that tarantino likes to steal from yeah and i just i just had a sort of a vision of uh you know some british or american director ripping off this sequence, executing it worse, and then in the course of being interviewed by Total Film or whatever it goes, yeah, it's actually an homage to this Senegalese film called Saloum, and everybody sucks him off about how well-read and widely-travelled he is. You've been looking at my plans for philosophy tube again i i genuinely think that there are things that that abula does with this that are like better than what tarantino would have done there's a bit before they kick in the door to rescue this

guy where like the music cuts out that i think tarantino would not have done i think tarantino would have kept that going through and i think it would have been a weaker movie yeah the audio direction in this thing i'm not uh there's a lot there's a lot of innovation like i'm not sure uh erbil or job are the first to do it ever but there's so much done in the film that's just like blew my mind and felt refreshing and while still connected to African cultural cinema practices. There's a lot that just goes straight back to Sembène, like the thing you talked about with the playing with the audio. Sembène does that in his films too.

There's a scene later where someone screams and a flute plays and it's this beautiful thing. And Sembène does stuff like that uh senban is a phenomenal uh french uh sorry senegalese francophone director who yeah i i noticed that too actually and one of the things that struck me about because there's a couple of times where this happens or like a character screams or cries and it's like replaced by a musical sting and it seemed sort of it stuck out to me because it seemed like replaced by a musical sting and it seemed sort of it stuck out to me because it seemed like something from a different era of movie making something that

like i've seen in movies from like the 70s maybe not exactly and it was like it was strange but like it was compelling to see it again yeah but so so we we see our mercenaries who we are told are called bangui's hyenas bangi bangi whoui. Who have res- Bangui, excuse me. I'm gonna fuck- look, I apologise in advance because I'm gonna fuck up every single point where I can fuck up in this. So we see them, they rescue this drug trafficker Felix, who is, to me, kind of one of the weaker characters in the movie. Yeah.

Doesn't get to do much definitely no he's actually just you know like in a unusual uh white majority cast there's one black guy and regardless of the actor's skills he's just not gonna do much and it's like this is a 90 percent senegalese production this is what it feels like that's actually deeply funny because there's like there are like maybe four white people in this film and they're used so rudely as well which i like yeah yeah and it's like no it's uh it will get into it later but like it's it is a bit of a satire like there's a satirical element of not just the western genre but the western approach to africans in film right and like

quite we get quite a few jokes off of that and it starts off with felix and just the way he's treated they get felix in the plane uh felix is immediately sort of ambiently furious and threatening all of them and then uh this is this scene, to me, part of the reason for this is that he's the weakest actor in the fucking plane, right? But they get him in the plane, and there's a fuel leak. They're trying to fly north to Senegal, but with the fuel leak they'll never make it as far as Dakar, which is where they've been paid to deliver Felix to, to rescue him for the cartel. And so they're forced to land.

Well, first, Felix is kind of being a bit of a dick to them. And the magic one, Papa Midnight, or Papa Minui, just blows magic powder in his face and just totally knocks him out, which is insanely cool. Also, I just want to talk about the look of Papa Minoui, who has white dreadlocks and a white beard. He just looks insanely cool. He looks like a cool wizard.

It's just all they all look good. He's the character design. Yeah. And I think the way that you talk about the character design, that's probably because Herbulo, he wanted to be a comics artist at one point a graphic designer and that can you can kind of see that through the like the fashion in the film it's because he's also uh he was a music video producer at one point and um he's just into

fashion and like the aesthetic of the film is just so on point like i love most aspects of it but the aesthetic is what brought me in because it's just like if you keep up with uh west african fashion trends and see how that relates to like other aspects of our of other cultural aspects of our art and it's just such a beautiful marriage where like of course like of course these mercenaries are the most fashionable people on the fucking continent like you know what i mean like rafa the pilot has versace shoes so he like accidentally gets the buckle off and it's it's so good man yeah it's great because they're forced to make a landing in southern senegal in the salon uh and the first thing we see we're kind of we miss it

misses having a landing scene but on the other hand i don't want it to do the sort of like um um without remorse thing where you like use all the budget on that and nothing else um but so but we we get on the ground and the first thing we see is our pilot rafa one third of the hyenas buffing his versace loafers and he he like knocks the buckle off of them and the light the line is great i think it translates well enough that i just want to put it in as a drop he's so good he says cool it's so good it's he specifically says uh like holy shit those guineans messed up my visage it's yeah and it's it's great rafa rafa is we immediately see his role in The Hines, we're now introduced

to the second of three of them, he's the big guy, he's the muscles, he's the enforcer. Again, we know me, we know Devon, we know that the second Rafa stepped on screen, I pointed straight at it, and I started reciting the, like, Adam Levine sects. I was like, holy shit, I'm now obsessed with you. Your body is absurd oh god he's so cool because again it's this little pops of color that they use because it's um he's got this like bleached beard and he's wearing these like red sunglasses it's just it's phenomenal they're all insanely cool looking motherfuckers yeah and and and And he goes off with the third hyena, their leader, Shaka, who is the brains.

The brains. Misha Servo, right? He's the one with the plan, and his plan is to immediately bury the case full of gold with the coordinates, and then he knows somewhere. He knows a camp that they can get to. They traverse. Yeah, he's got an Airbnb in the back pocket. He knows where to go.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Before they go, they figure out that the fuel line was breached, not by a bullet as they were taking off like they thought, but actually it's a knife. Somebody has sabotaged them. So they have to walk eight hours through the desert to this camp because they want to get resin to patch it up and fuel for the plane.

And they just walk eight hours through the desert or run carrying Felix. Yeah. Their initial assumption is that Felix has betrayed them. And like he has paid a team to take them out and then rescue him so that he doesn't have to pay them the gold or something like that. I salute their courage. If somebody told me you have to walk eight hours through the Senegalese desert carrying a Mexican man, I'd be like, I'm going to die.

I'm going to die now. I'm going to sit down and die. I'm not going to ruin my Versace any further, actually. I'm just going to sit down and accept the end. He swaps to some sensible trainers for the journey and then changes back into the Versace when you get there. Classic. Actually, that's what I do.

It's a fascinating little moment because it opens into one of the first major themes or motifs of the film, which is that hiding things leads to paranoia and more tension, right? We know that of the four people in the scene, Felix, Rafa, Papamini, Ushaka, one of them is hiding something because this was an inside job

that's that fucked up so that causes that that introduces us to the one of the films the themes of i was a little bit disappointed that we don't come back to the gold case um i thought that like i thought then the final act of the film was going to be like a race to get back to it or like it's not going to be there or somebody else moves it. I was like, okay, this is a valuable thing, but we just never see this again.

I have some confusing issues about the ending, but we'll get to that. But then in this scene, I did you, I, did you pick up on the, this is just like, Oh,

it's a look. It's a good, like location, a series of location shots but this is like just the quintessential shots from westerns where our heroes are riding on their horses through the desert and you've got the horsey clip cloppity music shit going on in the background you know and i i thought this was part of the parody of the film where it's like there are no fucking horses here poor rafa

yeah there's a great shot where they like sort of crawl to like the crest of a hill where like in in your western they would like find a bunch of horses tied up and it's a boat it's a canoe uh which they which they steal and they get on the river and go to yeah but before before they can get on the boat chaka is afraid of the water he will not get on that boat unless he gets knocked out by men we if we're sort of like working on a theory that there's this is a group of three people, of whom one is very, very large, very muscular, one of whom is, you know, nominally the smart one, but perhaps sort of in over his head a little bit, suffers from weird travel anxiety... He keeps trying to join the police.

I'm just saying, there's some parallels here. And the third one is, um, does that mean I'm magic, there's some parallels the third one is does that mean I'm magic yeah by default I must be magic I kind of like this but so he has Min Win knock him out the same as Felix to put him in the canoe

which is there's two things that I like about this that I want to draw out first of all is when he this, it's in the background of the scene. He falls over in the background. The foreground of the scene is Rafa talking to a guy about the boat, and the guy looks over Rafa's shoulder to see Shaka has just collapsed, and Rafa grabs his chin and is like, hey, hey, look at me instead. It's really... it's such a great little character moment.

It's really seductive and charming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the second thing is the camera work on this is, once he's unconscious, and once they put him in the boat, there is, I'm a sucker for this, I have mentioned this in the last two movies we talked about, but

if you suspend a camera over an actor's head to convey someone being kind of like out of their own body i always go that's really good i should talk about that on the podcast no that's cinema right there that's it's just it's amino to! It's like, oh my god. So they wake Shaka and Felix up, at the far end of the journey, where they've gotten to this place that Shaka knows about, and we get to introduce probably one of my favourite genders, which is innkeeper who is slightly off-putting. Yes! Yeah! I love this type of guy in absolutely

anything uh we we meet the proprietor of a camp called the baobab uh cool chuck is like don't worry i know the proprietor and then greets omar by name and i was like i do i know you i've got a photographic memory i don't quite recall he's like it was a long time ago yeah sort of it's not it's not the most subtle piece of foreshadowing but i really like it the film does not do subtlety in fact in this this like uh no for for uh particularly west africans this scene just that the fact that the camp is called Baobab, which is a tree that's found in lots of places in Africa, but in many West African places, it's the place where the community leaders and the other community meet to

discuss problems. It's meant to be a peaceful place, a place of gathering. And that kind of just sets up that, that we have these mercenaries coming in here. And then we have this shifty fucking innkeeper that just sets up that that we have these mercenaries coming in here and then we have this shifty fucking innkeeper that just sets up the the larger stakes that are that we know are coming you know oh so it's like an ironic name yeah you'd recognize that and and it also sets up the fact that we actually do see baobab trees later and there's also interesting things done with their meaning in larger west african culture so all of the all of the caverns are full and and chaka just immediately gives me the nod like go like arrange something about the whites and he goes all right i'm gonna put my

creepiest guy on this and Minuit just sort of like skulks into the back of the scene and in the next scene we see like some of the some of the visitors just screaming in terror and fleeing for their lives. These background characters that are scared out of it are some of the only white

people in the film and I think that cannot be not a specific choice. It's just like, it's so, so good. Omar comes back and he's like, it seems two cabins have become available. Yes.

I love Omar's delivery. I just love his delivery of almost everything. But like, he's just such a obviously shady guy, but like, he's still such a obviously shady guy, but like, he, he's still charming you, right? Yeah. You know, I love it.

It's, it's really sinister. And he, he kind of, he plays with, uh, with Rafa a little bit by getting him to, to, to drink in the bar and then telling him, explaining the sort of like the vibe of the camp, which is you don't is, let's just say you don't pay with money. Yeah. And then the light immediately comes back up and he's like, no, you just pay with work.

It's normal. It's normal here, actually. You just do some chores, you pay what you feel like you owe us, but everyone has some chores to do per day to keep the camp running. It's a nice little arrangement, but he waits until Rafa's had a drink and then this tells him what the price of a drink is and rafa is so mad about it immediately really really good so we have this we have this faustian character uh we have the faustian character of omar and i i need i thought it was important to mention that one of the first lines that comes out of his mouth when he's welcoming our trio is that, is he

quotes Dante's Inferno. He says, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Yeah, I've got to be honest. If I rolled up to a locale and the first thing the guy who ran it said was, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, I would be like, you know what? There's probably another one down the road.

Yeah, I might roll up to a different locale. Right, right? Like, he fucking castlevanias another one down the road yeah I might roll up to a different locale right right like he fucking castlevanias them and they're like okay no this is fine we're this is well to be fair they are the scariest motherfuckers that they know so that's true

if the three of us rolled up to a locale and somebody said that I'd be like well we are the scariest and best dressed people in 500 miles yeah let's do it plus plus chaka is like kind of keeping secrets about about this and and rafa and minwi that night try and sort of like puzzle out what's going on um to which min we can only sort of divine that there is a malign malign malign presence like he says there is an eye on us um and that that shaka is hiding something he won't say what but he is he's here for a reason and he's preparing to do something terrible um which great perfect stakes yeah no less than like two

times when we leans into chalk and goes, you are hiding something and it's gonna get us killed. And Chuck is like, ahhh, come on. And just cracks on with what he was doing. And you're like, buddy. So we have to go to dinner. Yeah, we get to meet the rest of the cast.

I love this scene. This scene's like a play. It's perfect. It's one of the best scenes in the movie. Both the dinner table scenes are fucking phenomenal. Yes, yes. So, first of all, we meet Omar's, he calls him his left arm. His right hand, I guess, would be your English idiom. Salaman. And this is great because another one of my favourite genders,

the weird off-putting guy's second weirder, more off-putting guy. The torgo to his manos. It's perfect. I love a henchman. And so Salamand is making the food, and he's also kind of hesitant and nervous and a little bit servile around the other guests. And it's like, hmm, interesting. I wonder what's going on there. And specifically, Salamand, the other guests and it's like interesting and specifically salaman uh the other guests speak in french but salaman is the only one who consistently speaks in wallach right which is the language non-colonial language spoken in one of the many non-colonial languages spoken in

senegal which i thought was an interesting choice. So we meet the other people staying there. We have a couple who, well, an ex-couple, who are fighting but are still working together. This would be Younes and Sefira. And they're...

Yeah, artists. Collaborators. I think Younes gets called a comedian later, but i'm not sure if that's a that's derogatory i think yeah yeah he's he's a rapper and he sort of dresses in such a manner and him being a rapper comes back later on and the actor who uh the actor who plays him who i believe is called uh his name is he's kind of bass his name is kindabas his name is Kanabas he's a Senegalese musician

and we also have Awa who has been staring daggers at everyone but specifically Shaka

from the second he sets foot in the camp I fucking love Awa and I love I love the way this scene is like let's all sit down

to dinner and like you expect it's gonna be like let's very slowly build the tension. But instead it immediately fucking ratchets up the tension because Awa is deaf and mute and only speaks sign language, but we are given subtitles.

And Chaka and Rafa also speak sign language. And Awa immediately lets them know, I know who you are. You're Bangui's hyenas. I'm onto you. Like, fuck you. Either take me with you when you leave or I will tell everyone here

um it's so fucking good it's really it's really really good and we we have this whole conversation because rafa mentions he quotes thomas sankara which i really like he he quotes him two years and i like this because it establishes something about Rafa that I think develops later on. There's another point where I want to draw this out, that I think Rafa has sort of a quiet backstory as a disillusioned revolutionary. That's what I thought too. Because he references Sankara in a way that is purely ironic. And I should also point out, the cover that they set up here the way that shaka goes

into this interaction is uh we are gold miners with our mexican investment partner who have come north on vacation this is the least credible thing you could possibly say and the great thing about it is they've kind of, unthinkingly, because he's the brains, he's the guy who has the plan, they've gone into this interaction with, okay, we've got to stay undercover at this camp for three days, get the fuel, get the resin, get out. Who do we want in charge of this? Do we want the guy who is very good at intimidating people, the guy who's magic, or Earth's worst liar. Easy choice as far as I'm concerned.

Send Chaka right on in there, baby. Everything Chaka says is like, sort of, barely restrained irony, and it just gets less and less plausible. Like, at one point Omar says, gold miners who speak sign language, and who quote Sankara, localized entirely within my camp! Yeah, everyone kinda knows they're full of shit at this point, but they haven't figured out in what flavour specifically they're full of shit. And Chaka's actor, actor uh young girl who's like great actor but he can't really hide what's going on right in his heart he just like you it's very

obvious that he's like there's a scene where there's a bit where he they ask him why are you always fucking wearing gloves and he's like oh i like to keep my fucking hands clean and it's like, oh, I like to keep my fucking hands clean, and it's like, it's just a weird scene, it's awkward. And it's just like, okay, my guy's like... He's just like a very shifty guy, and then Rafa makes the pussy-jig gesture. Yeah, he like, sexually harasses Awa, because

he's, you know, he's a pig. And what's great is, having thus ratcheted up the tension, we gotta turn it up another notch because we gotta introduce another late-coming guest. This is Omar's friend, Suleiman. And Suleiman is, he introduces himself as Captain Suleiman, and... Yeah.

And Shaka's sort of, like, trying to probe all over, just like, we're a captain of what? A police. Interesting. And you kind of know immediately, as does everyone around that table, that everyone has made everyone

else. There are multiple points throughout this where Rafa will just glance over at Minoui and Minoui will just shake his head and imperceptibly just to be like no we know they're on to us just give it another minute just just and also the the captain he comes in and he plays he's like i'm here on a very special mission to relax he hides beer bottles behind his back like he's got guns or something and he's like, ta-da! And it's fucking amazing. I'm with the CIA, chillin', it's awesome. Omar calls him a professional drinker, and we see him drinking the rest of the time until shit gets real, which, you can kind

of intuit some things about the professional reputation of the police in Dakar, where he's come from, maybe. Yeah, they suck. They fucking suck shit, they're horrible. But, so, yeah. We have a sort of, a nice meal. Nothing happens, ostensibly. And yet, sort of under the surface, you know, everyone's fucking thinking about, like, what everyone else is doing. If this were a less subtle movie,

everyone would be, like, holding guns under the table and you'd see that. But it's just sort of implied. They do that with their eyes. Yeah, like, Awa gets up to leave and immediately Chaka also gets up. And it's like, you're not even trying to not be suspicious yeah so he he threatens her and she is insistent you know take me with you and then after dinner we get possibly my favorite sort of sight gag in the movie it's it's kind of it's not a movie with a lot of comedy in it but our next shot is Rafa doing the dishes in the big white washing up gloves and totally shirtless. And it's great. It's like this, this tough guy who

doesn't want to get like, uh, like washing up liquid on his hands. Um, and something moves outside the bar and we see him sort of like follow this and he, he brings some, his machete with them. All of the outside shots are handheld throughout this part. And it, it really sells it. It really sells it. I actually missed the,

cause you see some just bizarre shadowy creatures in one of the shots where Rafa is cleaning. And I actually missed that the first time I watched it. It's done so quickly and sneakily. They, another thing in this in this scene specifically and they start doing it a lot later on which is that they are lighting the lighting rafa with a lot of different colors at all times yeah it's like a really stark yellow at this point it's like the the lighting from the bar and there's a green one later there's a red one it's just it's it's always so good goddamn video assist and the colored lights which is like uh which is a which is a trend in in like films with black people where it i noticed

at first in the 2010s where doing nighttime scenes, they just start lighting our skin with different colors because it pops better than trying to recreate natural lighting. And it ties into what... There's a lot of it in Moonlight, too. Exactly. And Ava DuVernay talks about it a lot. The Sierra Leonean filmmaker Nikiatu Jusu talks about it. Film is entertainment and everyone deserves to see themselves look beautiful.

And that's a thing where a lot of nighttime shots, even in some Ben's filming, he tends to avoid nighttime shots just because they didn't have a lot of the technology to do this. He does a lot of day for night stuff. didn't have a lot of the technology to do this like he does a lot of day for night stuff he'll uh just illuminate people's faces black people's faces in certain frames and then it just kind of looks weird and then you have this just it's such a simple fix of just let's try lighting them like they're not fucking white people it works so well it pops so hard. Yeah, it really does. And you can really dig into this. You can get into the history of how colour film stock was developed to work with skin tones, and how that was an explicitly racist project of like, well, we're going to normalise this for light skin tones. And how that's sort of been gradually overcome. But so, the next morning, we see Minui tell Shaka, hey, Rafa didn't come back last night.

And we're immediately like, oh, shit. Yeah, this is fun. They've got him. They've got his ass. And then they... But Omar has called a meeting to assign chores. They go to the meeting, Rafa just sort of like stumbles in with the clear implication that he has been with Sephira all night. He's just sort of like, he's been spooked, he's just wandered off to just go and get fucking laid. Yeah, it's really funny actually.

And then like, Shaka tells him off and he's like, you said to relax, like... Yeah, he's like, look, we like we're here for resin fuel and relaxation I don't see any resin fuel so I'm relaxing but he gives Shaka the ultimatum he's like look Awa wasn't the last to arrive it was the cop so we can assume that they both know

who we are and there's only one seat on the plane so who has to die um and during this the shot is perfectly framed with our and the cops faces and they're between the two of them talking to each other and it's just it's fucking gorgeous is what it is incidentally the the line that rafa has here that this also goes into my little revolutionary thing is uh because oh i was talking about the chores and about his sort of principles of everyone, does a little bit of work, he's handing them all out, and Rafa's just says, by way of passing,

yeah we should do this before the old man resurrects Biafra. Right? Yeah, what's that all about? Biafra was a separatist region of, I'm going to really embarrass myself if I'm wrong about this, Nigeria. Yeah, it's Nigeria. Which precipitated... A little, like, correct noise from Price is Right or something. Just edit that in. Yeah, but that precipitated a civil war, but it was kind of a utopian project initially, and the fact

that that's what Rafa chooses to reference is... Hmm. So clever. Yeah, it's such a, like, disappointed revolutionary thing. Like, you know, to make a better world by force of arms is impossible, therefore I'm doing this. Specifically because Biafra ended up with uh the genocide of the ebo people by the larger nigerian government that's that's what biafra

was it's not explicitly an ebo state but it was a state uh run by a bunch of ebo people who wanted to be separate from the nigerian government because the the Nigerian government is awful. It has just literally been a series of military dictatorships with some periods of democracy. It's not that distinct from a lot of West African nations' histories, but Nigeria specifically is just this old, gigantic military force. Not to mention all the European involvement in the Civil War as well. Oh yeah, yeah. But! So we assign the tasks, and Rafa is going with Awa to count birds, because there's a

bird sanctuary. And that's the first thing that we follow. And they have this conversation in sign language, where she, once again, she immediately makes him. She's like, you are one of the hyenas. I have heard of you. I've heard of everything you've done. Take me with you or else. It's so good that all of the exposition in the early film comes through Awa.

It's so, so, so good. hour like it's such a yeah it's so so so good because the night before we had seen her with her uh one of the like the hyenas calling cards actually like yeah yeah she has one yeah and and like you get the sense that like in the boat in the conversation they have while they're looking for birds you get the sense that she looks up to these hyenas. She keeps up with all the exploits. She refers to them as heroes, which is fascinating because the director and the producer were talking about they wanted to make a film that showed that Africa could have heroes, but they didn't want to make a heroic film. They weren't obviously trying to replicate the MCU or anything.

It's just the heroes from like, yeah, for sure. Like Westerns, they're complicated characters, but there is some wrestling with morality within the character, you know? the thing that I really like about this is that Rafa denies this.

He, he, he says, he says, why do you want to, what do you want to run away with the devil? And she laughs at him. She says,

you devils, which is great because, implies there's way worse shit out there, but B, I love this thing from Westerns of like, I am a good guy at heart, I have done many good things, I will absolutely

deny it, and I will flee from any kind of positive reputation. It's really good, is the thing thing so they have that conversation meanwhile uh it's important to note that uh in the conversation they have they list a bunch of uh places that the hyenas have had influence on in their mercenary mission throughout life yes sierra leone they they cleared the rUF out of Sierra Leone out of Freetown. They mentioned the Celica in the Central African Republic, which is actually a very tiny moment,

but it ties into larger Senegalese film because the Celica, the term for the coalition in the Central African Republic that resulted in war, that didn't pop up until 2012, and this film is set in 2003. And that, to me, was like a reference to Sembène Ousmane's own anachronistic films where he'll just skip forward

a few centuries just to for emotional resonance within a scene. And I thought that was a little play and sort of your hero like exists a little bit outside of time exactly exactly because they're heroes they're like that's what a hero is like someone who can keep popping up again and again in conflicts throughout africa like these guys do but across time too and especially every conflict that our... Like Link. Exactly. Yeah. And also kind of like Link. Like Mad Max.

Yeah. But like Link being a child soldier, technically, every conflict that... That's true. We don't talk enough about the Great Deku Tree's child soldier program. Perfect segue, man. Fucking phenomenal.

Every conflict that they mention involves child soldiers, which becomes important later to the scene. To the film, I mean. to go on our second and third chores we see minui uh go with uh with salaman to drop off some aids to a village which likes helps sustain the camp and in another one of my favorite little things creepy village love creepy village every building has a big r spray painted on it not prominently enough that you'll notice it on the first watch, probably, but it's there. I didn't even see that! And the little... It's not good? Yeah, yeah! It's on every building, as is a graffito of, like, a guy with an old-timey revolver. I think he's actually literally wearing a cowboy hat in it, too. So Minwi delivers this aid, and it's weird. It's picked up by some young men who they describe as the wrestlers, and they all have

the, like... I'm not sure if it's what missing an ear looks like, or if it's just been sort of like, mutilated in some way. Yeah, it looks like it's burnt shut. Yeah, burnt shut almost, right? Yeah, burnt shut, yeah. It's important to note that, yes, they go to a village, but the village is specified as a Jola village. And the Jola are indigenous to West Africa, but specifically are believed to be among another few groups, some of the first people to be in the region.

some of the first people to be in the region. We'll discuss this later, but it's difficult to apply indigeneity to Africa outside the context of white people, because when you don't have just a bunch of annoying people coming and being like, this is our land, and they're from fucking Europe, it's hard to know, especially when a lot of our history is oral history. especially when most of our a lot of our history is oral history uh but the jola like it's it's important to note that the jola are were some of the first people here because that kind of ties into yet another of the film's themes that were introduced to later so we have that we go to the village we see that it's creepy that's that's that lovely shot of of the wrestlers before they

pick this up when they're when they're first displayed they're staring directly into the camera which yeah it's just weird vibes and then the film creates weird vibes in a very yeah it sets you slightly on edge because you're just trying to watch a movie and suddenly they're looking straight at you and you're like wait hold on hold on i'm not part of this buddy so it does put you a little bit on edge and i thought the the interaction with the crowd right like that's a common thing yes across semban usman's films but honestly just across a bunch of african cinema i've seen especially in the more modern bit of it like with jusu with uh the the director of i am not a witch and a few other uh modern african films

where there's just this interaction with the crowd with sam bennett goes back to the fact that he learned how to make films from the soviets and he was just like a lot of uh africans just a communist oh it's all fucking eisenstein of course it is and like they're drawing from that they're drawing from that tradition of crowd work of the literal literal masses, and having them interact with the... Incredible. So, Shaka goes with Omar to take care of the fishers of the Delta, which is... we don't know what this is yet. We know that they're up to some shit, and it's gonna require the use of BB guns.

And what this transpires to be is the only other group of white people in the movie. That's right, the last two. Very sort of like, clownish-looking jerk vanderclerk types loading dynamite onto a boat, because they're gonna go upriver and fish with it, and fish with explosives, and fuck the ecosystem. And so, in order to protect it, Omar has inveigled Chaka into literally just shooting at them with BB guns until they flee in terror. Which we don't see!

We see them sight them up with the guns, and then we don't actually see the actual moment of it happening, only them walking back afterwards um and it's a sort of i i don't know how i feel about it it's it's played for comedy and it kind of like it's a jarring shift in tone is the thing it also makes me question something that happens later in the film so without spoiling it we see later shortly in fact that chaka has some historic beef with omar and i'm like okay why did you not beyond beef why did you not bring this up when you had him alone that's the that's a beautiful thing for me of like when you when you said the word play there right like this reminds this this is a this is a part of the fact that Jean-Luc Reveillaud is a fucking gamer.

The only pieces of media he acknowledges as a direct influence were the video games he was playing when they were producing the film, which were Red Dead Redemption and one of the Metal Gears from the 2017 2017-2018 i thought i was going fucking crazy i genuinely i was like do i talk about metal i'm imagining that this is like a heavily inspired by metal gear solid five i'm crazy right there's no way it would be insulting to even bring that into the comparison it's like no it just is right no like these are like what the what happens with these uh tasks that omar gives out is these are side missions like for fuck's sake genuinely yeah it's a bit yeah it's a bit incongruous we're back to child soldier link again yeah exactly yeah but so so so they're walking back together afterwards, and they talk to each other, and they both acknowledge each other as former soldiers.

And they have this sort of like, oh, you know, where did you fight conversation? I had to get a stone out of a big fish's belly and then take it to a castle that was an eye map. What side quests have you done? And, you know, they each talk about different wars, all of which, again, are notorious for the use of child soldiers. Exactly.

But we don't... unless you know that offhand, this conversation seems more placid than it is. And he asks Omar, okay, well, I need fuel, I need resin, sort of dropping the pretense of being gold miners at this point. I need those, can you help me get them? And Omar says, sure, of course I can. We now go to our final task, which is replanting mangrove swamps. And this is what Felix and suleiman are doing and the thing

about suleiman is that he's a fucking badass i fucking love my favorite characters in this movie he goes full sort of like 70s cop mode in that the second they're out of that camp he he he goes to felipe and just like claps him on the shoulder and goes, by the way, the cartel has put a price on your head. You have to work with me or you are going to get killed. My guys are waiting to arrest all of the hyenas, and if you don't help me, then, you know, I'm gonna let them kill you. And then he leaves him, literally like squatting in a mangrove swamp with a mangrove seedling in his hand. Just like, yeah.

That's very well played. About halfway through Suleiman's speech as well, Felix has been smoking the entire time and a cigarette just falls out of his mouth. It's really good. It's such a moment of, of now you're so made brother you have been fucking made from the moment i saw you anyway plant your fucking seedlings there's a lovely bit here where uh felix is talking about oh he uses the spanish word for

mangrove and he's like we have these back in mexico and i think that scene was included because um uh list uh alejandro in the ritu as one of his major influences as like he watched in the ritu film and was like i need to become a fucking director and it's like that connection there of like uh obviously the western genre does have some in some influence with is influenced somewhat by mexican culture of the of the same time period and whatnot and then you have it brought back into just this little personal uh love letter to mexican cinema that uh every little includes where it's just like we're kind of the same you see and it's just a little fun moment that warmed my heart

it's really nice so we come back to the camp where everyone has now had their little side quest and the first thing that happens is Minui walks up to Minui walks up to Shaka and goes you are hiding something cunt you're gonna get us killed

we should leave now everything is fucked here yes and shark is like ah let's just sit down for dinner what's the worst that's gonna happen yeah we're just i'll handle it just have dinner meanwhile sullivan literally has one hand on the back of felix's neck like yeah he's he's fine he just going to sit with me for a bit. Shaka excuses himself. He goes to visit Awa, who makes a horrible mistake by opening the door to him and immediately gets jumped and tied up. Right. Okay. And we see her.

We see. Okay. I don't want to skip too far. But like, we see her cutting the zip tie later that he, that he binds her with later. And it's like, it's just not that thick a zip tie. And she has to have been in there for the entire dinner scene. And like, it takes her way too long.

It's, it's, it's ridiculous. It's like, I don't know. Those, those flex caps are kind of tough. Uh, you gotta have the, like the tool for them, but she has a tiny blade. Yeah. So, but, with her out of the way, everybody comes for dinner, and Omos is like, well, it's weird Awa isn't joining us, but you know, no one's a prisoner here, because, you know, irony. And, at this point, the mask kind of, like, really is, like, almost off.

Shaka, like, gets through about two minutes of conversation, looking into Omar's face from one end of the table to the other. And then he goes, yeah, it used to be way bigger when I was here this camp uh and also you know it used to be sort of way way more frightening um back when i was here as a child such a perfect monologue man it's so good he he like he doesn't even say child soldier ultimately like he's just like no he like looks over the side and goes wasn't that like a lean-to earlier on against that? It was corrugated. The wind was coming through. The days here are so hot, but the nights can be glacial. This long,

long speech, and the entire time you can see Omar's going, ah... I may have made a mistake here. A mistake, an error. And it is revealed that Omar was the commander in charge of these child soldiers that

Chaka used to be one of, and he escaped. He did have a nom de guerre. And that nom de guerre was Colonel Remington. Because he carried on the battlefield a very heavy, very shiny, very large caliber

Remington New Model army revolver plated as well gorgeous yes it is a beautiful it is nickel plated and pearl that's what i meant yeah and uh yeah which which shaka has because as we've sort of seen fleetingly in like little visions whenever he's unconscious or asleep he escaped and he he took it and he like fled into the river with this with this midway through the speech he takes his gloves off to reveal that he has those r's that are like burned into his like branded the backs of both hands and then chaka gets up and just starts he fucking just opens fire like at the end of his speech it is clear that there is there's no response that can be given at this point other than to die uh so he just starts fucking firing

just just absolutely unloading into his lad and then like everything's slows down it's in perfect chaos everyone is trying to hide um and it keeps getting i'd be interested to learn a little bit about kind of the way they did the firearms tech on this because i don't know whether it's just the actor convincingly portraying it but it seems that when he fires the remington it has a kick to it and i'm i guess that must just be him acting that because if it was blank switch it would be it would not have a way you could put um yeah absolutely i think he just acts that really well yeah absolutely i mean the thing is it's a it's a heavy gun it's got some real sort of like inertia to it so that's that's some physical acting you're

doing um is it is it a gun are those types of guns like still in use it looks like an old-timey it looked like a out of a western to me you know like i wouldn't be surprised you can get reproductions of them an old one would be very very very like valuable and fragile it's it's there because it like it's thematic and it looks cool i i don't think it's really plausible okay yeah that was my question yeah yeah so there's a number of things yeah throughout the scene first of all throughout the entire speech it's like a long speech it's perfectly acted we get shots of everyone around the table slowly coming to the realization at the same time like the moment he starts talking then he puts his head in his hands rafa rafa is

like he he's upset to begin with, but the second the gun comes out, Rafa starts immediately considering how he's going to disarm Suleyman. Puts him in, yeah, and he does so. Which he does, yeah. And throughout the shots where Shaka is shooting Omar, it keeps cutting back and forth between the two actors in present,

the adult actor and the current Omar, and the child actor and the current Omar, and the child actor, and a much younger Omar. It's just, it's phenomenally effective. It's really fucking good. We learn that Shaka was the one who sabotaged the plane, he wanted to come here all along. And also, the cop

is like, well, it's, well, Lupin, the base is surrounded, and Shaka's like, actually, I bribed your mates with the gold, they're not coming. Get fucked. And then the film drives off Cliff. It's a really elegant thing. Wait, right before that.

Right before that. Yes, before we get mad at Adam. I think it's important to note that one of the scenes where Shaka shoots Omar and they're switching between young Shaka, old Shaka, younger Omar

old Omar and at one point young Shaka gives the gun to Omar and Omar places it within his mouth and like that's a huge symbol right there because the film as we'll learn later makes a lot of parallels between Shaka and the man who abused him, Omar.

And it's kind of like a cautionary tale for Chaka. Like, you shouldn't have become like this. And we learn more about that later. Okay, Abby, please go ahead. It really does feel like every time I bring a movie part of the episode is to turn to abby and go you didn't like this enough fuck you but yes why why turning big spotlight on my friend why why are you wrong about no it is completely reasonable if you went in blind yeah i went into completely blind to this film and and because it's made by a culture that i know nothing about

and i also did not pick up on any of the ways in which this was telegraphed. But now there are spirits. Well, as Salaman, in his sort of attendant creep role, helpfully informs them, as they're sort of forced like, forced into the hut with Awa by a sort of huge overcasting of what seemed to be flies and smoke and debris. And Salomon immediately does the creepy laughing, ah, what you've done there is you've made an error.

The theme of this movie is, if you take revenge, you will die. It is now time for you to die. Yes. But the thing is, right, I thought I knew what the moral lesson of this film was going to be. Which was, these are bad men. They have gone to a place that is sacred and protected. And the first thing they've done is bury a shitload of drug money in it, they are now shortly going to be punished for their crimes. And that lasted until about the conversation between Rafa and Awa, where we're like, oh

wait a second, maybe- so they are kind of good guys, but it's more complicated than that because it's more political than that. Now we get to the point where Salomon tells them, you've just killed the only barrier between these hostile spirits and us. And to me, again, this is sort of politics by stealth, right? Like, every authoritarian in history has always ruled with the idea of like, it's only me, only I can hold down this sort of this chaos that is always under the surface and the second i'm gone anarchy is going to be loosed upon the world and they've conducted a kind of like spiritual coup d'etat here um in i think much the same way as the coup d'etat in

beso that starts out the movie but well i I've got to say, I missed all of that. And my interpretation of the film up to this point was like, these guys are sick. Dudes rock. Revenge is cool because Omar had child soldiers and then they killed him. And I was like, cool, good. This was an unambiguously good thing to do. You should do that.

I did also write down, to be fair, I would watch about a couple of dozen prequel movies about the hyenas just doing their thing. I thought the rest of the movie was going to be them doing a fighting retreat to the gold, fighting the cops all the way back. I was like, cool, that's great. Like, cool action movie, finishing this. Because I didn't get any of the spiritual, like, foreshadowing at all. Didn't get any of that. And yeah, honestly, this just kind of came out of nowhere.

And I was like, oh, okay. I guess it's just also like are we supposed to feel that it is bad to kill omar i'm like i don't feel that it's bad to take revenge let me explain you the moral valence of this right because there's there's a sort of there is what i think is a storytelling weakness in the film which is they get in the hut and they go salaman explain what the deal is with this. And Salaman explains what the deal is with this. And the deal is that the Salum used to be inhabited by a people called the Bainuqs. There was a land deal in which they gave up their land and betrayed their king,

and they beheaded their king. And in the course of doing that, their king cursed the land forever. And that's, I think, that this is a sort of often unfamiliar approach to curses outside of the classical sphere in Western narratives, right? Of, it doesn't matter if you're doing the right thing, or if you're a good person. If the curse is there, it's fucking there. Like, it being sort of like, changed by your goodwill or your pureness of heart, yeah, maybe, I guess, but you've still gotta confront it, because it's a very real thing. Yeah, exactly.

And it's something that has like, materially changed the character of the land. Yeah, exactly. of the Congo, not the one that was Zaire, but Congo Brazzaville. And he like witnessed war on a firsthand level. It's not that surprising to me that he would interpret curses and all that to be to a pacifist message, essentially. That's what the film is about, of like, we're not meant to actually be violent. It's not great. At least I felt that's what the director was trying to go for. not great at least i i thought that's what the director was trying to go for of that that like can we can we talk about indigeneity at this point right as well because that's a that's a fascinating aspect of that because like uh the bainuk are also like the jewel are also support believed to be some of the earliest inhabitants of senegal and they were pushed out by mandinka and serer expansion into the region hundreds of years ago. And Chaka actually says when Salman is explaining to them about, oh, the Bainuk are here and the king's curse is living and the king is still in power, Chaka actually says, no, the Serer dominate Saloum now which is, I thought the director commenting

a little bit on the fact that Senegal's first president who was a great poet for example but a little too fond of the French for a lot of Senegalese people but also just people who don't like colonialism Leopold Senghor

is a Serre from the Saloum region. Yeah, and this idea of like, your modern country is built on land that has been taken from people, land that like... in an American context and a Western context, and I'm hesitant to translate this directly, but I do think there are parallels that you can draw out with the way that Westerns treat Native Americans. In particular, the idea that, like, these are people who have been wronged, who are capable of spiritual vengeance upon you, is... like, that's a feature. Like, Native American curses and stuff. But even, like, in the more physical sphere, and this is where I want to talk about a much worse movie,

which I think in the group chat we have dubbed White Salon Bone Tomahawk. So I'm sad to be hearing about Bone Tomahawk again. I've never seen it. Bone Tomahawk. The deal with Bone Tomahawk is that uh kurt russell is a sheriff and uh a tribe of native americans who have been kicked off of their land have become mutant cannibals and they try to eat russell it's fucking it's fucking terrible hawk is one of those movies where it's it's when you talk about it you're essentially just talking about full caps the scene and the scene in bone tomahawk is where the chief of this tribe

cuts a dude in half like lengthwise dick first and it's just yeah it's all fucking there and it's like man i don't need to see this right now i'm having a nice evening moving to a much lower form of art than than salem yeah yeah hot dog style, just chops him right in half. With a tomahawk. So Salaman explains what the deal is, which is, yeah, the spirits, they're gonna take your senses one by one, that you're safe in the huts because they're repelled by electric light, however, if you're going out there you need hearing protection. We get the arming yourself scene from Commando, but one thing I do like is that it is...

Minoui takes a sort of very central role here, and it's explicitly as important to, like, spiritually arm yourself as literally. The director specifically calls Minoui a black magic witcher, cause again, he's a fucking gamer, and like- Oh, he does have the witcher hair. For fuck's sake. We gotta stop gamers from making movies. No, no, this movie's really good, we should keep him doing it. Just this guy, though.

I keep thinking of, wait, this is- you're just loading up on, like, potions and shit, like, I've done this, I've, like, I've- Applying oils to your sword, all of this. He's got a fairy in a bottle, things've done this. I'm, like, I'm... Applying oils to your sword. He's got a fairy in a bottle. Things of this nature. Yeah. Rafa, like, Rafa, like, forgives Shaka for, like, being a dick. And, like, he apologizes for the, you know, the suffering that he's been through. Yeah, they love that.

They hug. Yeah, they, like, reaffirmirm their friendship which i thought was lovely just really nice like because obviously these are people who have been together for fucking years fighting so to hear that like their leader had suffered like this they're mad at him for betraying them in the way of like making them unwitting parts of this but they also completely understand of it like all right we we're now in this situation together but they also completely understand of it like, alright, we're now in this situation together and we will get out of it together. And they say together

to the end in various languages and I thought that was just really sweet because the hyenas are like I believe they're called half Senegalese half Central Afrique and like, yeah they're a multicultural group of mercenaries and they found love across cultures That's right And like, uh, that's- yeah, they're a multicultural group of mercenaries.

And they found love across cultures. Just like this podcast. That's right. That's right. I need to get more Versace. Shaka and I will go out to try and find more hearing protection for the others, using Minwi's Walkman. Before they do that, though, Awa asks Shaka to give her the Remington gun,

and Shaka refuses to let it go. He refuses to let go the symbol of generational violence, political violence that he stole from Omar, which I thought was beautiful. Because I like the relationship between Shaka and Awa, especially because people kind of treat her shittily, but Shaka is the only one

that actually puts hands on her. He's the most aggressive towards her. And if you view it as her being the, she seems like the youngest character in the film, right? And she definitely is the most, she looks up to the hyenas the most as maybe the child soldiers looked up to Omar. And then we see that Shaka, who, again,

his whole mission is, it's implied to try not to become like Omar. He treats her a little bit the way that Omar must have treated him as a child, you know? Again, though, I'm saying it's good to take revenge against people who kidnap child soldiers. I mean, we also see that Shaka goes to the shack. I mean, sipping for waslally. Shaka goes to a shack and it's like full of child soldiers and mean we also see that chaka goes to the shack i mean sipping for was slightly chaka goes to a shack and it's like full of child soldiers and he sets them free which is a good thing that's a good part of his revenge um yes i'm once again saying revenge is good it's

good to take revenge it's good to kill people who take child what watching movie that begins and ends with the narrator going revenge will drown drown you. Revenge seems pretty based, actually. I mean, it's a net good in this film. It doesn't work out that good for Shaka, but it helps a lot of people. So in the sense of like, okay, but like, this is about child soldiers, right? We're wondering, how are child soldiers produced? And it's, yes, there's lots of different reasons. But in all the conflicts listed, a lot of the times both sides are using child soldiers.

It's this thing of, yes, obviously being child soldiers is good, but what are you doing about the conditions that keep producing them? Because Chaka just becomes Omar. If Chaka just becomes Omar, there's going to be another conflict where he's going to have to justify the usage of child soldiers because everyone else has died or they're just the easiest to control. You know what I mean? There's a point later on where after the reveal of the child soldiers, which I'll talk about here a little bit, which is you can tell, first of all, the absolute fucking weight that this has to Chaka. weight that this has uh to chaka because he's very clearly been plotting his revenge for years and he's been biding his time because he thought omar was like had stopped and had like settled down and the moment he gets in that room he realizes that this has been going on the entire time that he's been waiting and it's like so heavy to him that like suleiman even like the cop that

he's just sort of unveiled in this like genuinely reaches out to comfort him in that moment. And the second thing is that it's a child soldier conflict, right? Because Omar was a man who used child soldiers and now he's sort of, quote unquote, retired. And he's still using child soldiers. He's still using children as the currency to keep the peace with the binoc king um and that using child soldiers is sort of like a oh we're not we're not happy to do this but it does like it's a means to an end of keeping peace is exactly how he would

have justified it back when he was using it in like physical conflict. It's the same thing over and over. It's also... It's the way you get out of a war crimes prosecution whenever the US comes to your country and sets up an international criminal tribunal, is to be like, listen, I'm putting my child soldier army on the path to peace. Exactly.

I mean, I do get sort of... The vibes off of Omar, to me, are pure Charles Taylor, Joseph Cone. Oh, definitely. And, but, you know, there's a lot of guys like that, who did not become as famous. And you know, kind of did largely get away with it. General Butnake. And so I think it's compelling to be like, no, not this one.

Yes. Oh, yeah. I very much remember General Butt Naked. Who's a fucking priest now. He's a priest. After all, he's a literal cannibal. Like, a literal cannibal. Which, okay, I guess Catholicism and Christianity being about eating Jesus also.

Okay, I see. Yeah, this is my body. This is my blood. Very familiar territory already i see why cannibal would have been like oh okay i i like this is a religion for me but oh yeah i get this learning about catholicism being like yo okay all right this is my entire life is is like eat eating other people and abusing children. You're telling me that guy became a priest? I must really be disappointed if he'd been a real

cannibal. He's just getting the wafer. He's like, fuck is this? That was promised flesh! Right? Exactly. That's the blood! This is just wine! Like, spitting it out. Like... I... Let me get my composure back. It's funny. I ain't like spitting it out. Yeah.

Let me get my composure back. It's funny. I also thought one of the inspirations for the character of Omar is a figure common to Senegalese, the Senegalese practice of Islam. In Senegal, the major version of Islam is Sufism, actually, and where there's a bunch of Sufi brotherhoods, like the Murids and the Baifals and all that. And one big

way that manifests in Senegal is through the figure of a Marabou, who's like a Muslim spiritual leader, and specifically along the Sufi tradition, usually, like a sheikh or something. And usually how this...

And Sufism is very hereditary and quite isolated into branches as well, too. Yes, yes. The version in Senegal has relations with the version in North Africa, for example. But the figure of the marabou has students underneath them. The word used is talibé, and it literally means like seeker, student. And how this works is the parents are supposed to give their children to the talibé for Muslim education and just general education too. education and just general education too but uh and like the the talibay specifically promised the the marabu specifically promises to the talibay and the talibay's family that they will give them protection security and they'll help facilitate their way into paradise which are all

things that uh shaka says ormar promised the children the child soldiers and it becomes a it becomes a parallel there of like where we're we're not only looking at child soldiers but i think kherbilow is making a parallel between the plight of child soldiers and that of the talib who are actually subject to quite a bit of abuse from their marabou, because the marabou asks them to go work for them, to beg for them. And that the marabou will, for instance, do their five daily prayers for the children, so the children have more time to go beg. But there's also, in Senegal, there's the constant discussion about just the sexual abuse that you imagine would happen in this kind of situation,

where children just aren't protected enough, you know? And actually, the narration that introduces the region says it's the land of the Great Maribyrn. Exactly! Exactly. I mean, it makes sense. So at this point, Shaka goes back to Salaman to be like, do more exposition.

Explain what the deal is with this. Because there's all these spirits running around outside. Oh, actually, the spirits run around outside. I wanted to talk about that, too. There's this, okay, first we need to introduce the spirits. That I actually had trouble with. Because what they are, they look to me like Kankurang, which is more a Mandinka tradition.

But the Bainuk were influenced by the Mandinka culture because of the Mandinka expansion into their regions, of course. So the Kankurang, these are functions in Mandinka and West African cultures because they're just masquerades and a bunch of West African cultures have masquerades. And their function is protective. a bunch of West African cultures have masquerades and their function is protective. Specifically, they protect new brides, newborns, and,

uh, newly circumcised young boys from witches and malevolent, malevolent spirits attracted to the blood. That's usually part of these rituals and whatnot. And they are, their, their design is, uh,

like my, my father, uh, was a kankurang for a bit as a child, as a young man, sorry. And they're based off of a tree. Like they get a bunch of fibers from a tree, and the fibers are usually orange, and then you enshroud yourself in it, and you walk around with swords and dancing,

and there's a drum. There are drummers that follow you around. They're the helpers of the kankurang. And I thought that was a fascinating decision to make these kankurangs into the monsters of the film because they do fulfill their function. At no point do we see them actually harm little boys, right? But also, the way they move, because I've seen a lot of Kankurangs up close, and the way they move is their legs are always moving,

so it looks a little bit like they're flying. That's the belief that they can leap over the river and all that kind of stuff. And I just love the way they're designed because of that, because it's a bit of a perversion of it, because if it's meant to be a real Kankurang, it should be orange, but it's shrouded in death and like just black fibers.

It looks more like flies than the fibers of a tree or anything. And I just, I love the- It's really compelling. Yeah. And there's this long shot, especially where a lot, it's not, I don't think it's actually a continuous shot properly, but it's edited to look that way, where the only sound is the soundtrack of the talking drum and just the gender. You mentioned the drums just now.

I want to say, yeah, talk about the talking drum. Cause that comes in hard at the point where like it's the spiritual half of the film, the talking drum, the talking drum, the tema is a,

is a drum where, uh, it's percussion that you can change the pitch of the beats where like uh but usually they it's a drum that you can squeeze and they hold it in the in the crook of their shoulder and then squeeze into it and it'll the notes will change pitch so that it actually ends up sounding like uh human speech like uh i yeah i think the first time a lot of Western viewers must have come across it is in the Wakanda soundtrack by Ludwig Goranson, who actually goes, he went to Senegal and like just hired Senegalese musicians like Baba Mal. And they have their late motif for the king in that film,

T'Challa, sorry, is T'Challa. So you hear that a lot in the Black Panther film. And you hear that a bunch in this. That's what that was. Exactly. You hear that a lot in this long fucking scene of them trying to avoid these Kankurang. And that's actually a thing. Like when in the Kankurang rituals that I've been a part of,

celebrations and whatnot, the Kankurang will like whatnot, the kangkorong will go after you. They will chase after you. You're meant to evade them, actually. It's a lot of fun. And Herbulo, being as brilliant as he is, recognizes that, yes, that's a cultural practice, but it's also ludic. There's a gameplay element to that.

I remember as a kid running away from these, being like, ah, the kang oh the concurrent's gonna get me like it's just and yeah i remember thinking this sequence is like quite video gamey that these spirits are on like patrol paths they are they are exactly i get you got so much more out of it than i did because my notes at this point say if they are spirits how come you can kill them with a knife because well they kind of aren't i understood this to be that the spirits are sort of, like, riding the guys from the village that we saw earlier. Yes, that's...

Kind of. There is a person under there in the same way that they're doing the masquerade. There is a more specific type of masquerade called the Ifang Bondi, which, uh, that kind of translates to remove oneself from. So like, the idea that you've removed your humanity and you've become the ifangbondi. So that kind of translates to the idea of spirits riding humans. When I hear the word spirit riding a human, I think voodoo, I think voodoo, I think all that kind of the Noahs and all that that shit and it's not exactly that

but i do see the parallel actually i never thought about that yeah sure so so shaka goes back to to salamon's like explain he walks into that building like everyone else is sort of like getting their breath and he just like walks in immediately punches salamon like no nobody buddy we've not been given the full fucking story here yeah and and And Salaman doesn't give him the full story either. Here's something that I found to be, all right, Suleiman, first of all, the cop, love him dearly. He's so fucking good.

The second everything like changes gear, he has the most phenomenal vibes throughout. But what happens is when Chaka walks in and like punches the fuck out of Salaman, Rafa steps forward to try to stop him and suleiman is the one to stop rafa yeah that's which i found because he's just seen what they he's just seen the room with charles no this guy should be like yeah the cop man after my own heart like yeah cool it's good that this man dies yeah so so shaka like correctly as it turns out says listen there's there's good that this man dies yeah so so shaka like uh correctly as it turns out

says listen there's there's no way this this magical shit is happening just because he wanted to run a hotel right he wanted he wanted something more out of this than like a super was like i have given up on on hope and life look if you want to go toe-to-toe with paris hilton you've got to have a spiritual army that's true you need a fucking and salaman is like yeah of of course there was some shit going on he was making a deal with the entity what is the entity we never find out okay i love that okay because i've actually been like uh i don't know if i mentioned but like my mother's from the saloon region and like when i've been in senegal people have just randomly like baptized me like i like i'm not

even kidding some dude just i was i was just chilling with an uncle and one of his friends came over threw some liquid at my face and i was like i've baptized you and i was like okay okay like what religion are you sorry hey man sorry i had to do this because of the entity and like no like legitimately like it's a thing of there is some secretive element to the way that I've seen the supernatural approached in Senegal. Because quite a few people are believers in marabouts, in going to intermediaries between you and your god or whatever. You'll see a lot of people wearing amulets that are somewhat hidden. like we getting at people, you'll see a lot of people wearing amulets that are somewhat hidden.

You'll see a lot of people wearing protective garbs. You'll see, we people believe in gin. It's a thing. And I thought this, this, the entire approach where like, it's, it's oblique,

it's an indirect approach to the, what should be, what other films might've directly explained. Like, yeah, you're right. This, it's just the entity that is extremely fucking vague.

I do not know what that means but i also have been having been in senegal cannot fully say that i fully understand what the spirituality that people are expressing because it's just have just have a guy yeah it's it's just i don't know why that guy did that i don't know if i'm fucking cursed or not but like i think so think so I think you're probably fine baptism's usually good let's hope I think I'm I have no idea what happened there hey mark of a good movie

by the way mark of a good movie we have just spoken about it for longer than the run time we just passed it that's another thing listeners it's just it's like an 80 minute film. It's perfect. When was the last time you watched?

It's a tight 90. It's great. It's great. So at this point, Salomon deploys his pocket satin. He's been saving this the whole time. It was very funny that he used the pocket satin, but he gets away. Then summarizing slightly for the sake of time,

the cop gets got. He tries, Salomon almost gets away, but the child soldiers kill him. uh then summarizing slightly for the sake of time the cop gets got um yeah he tried like salaman almost gets away but the child soldiers uh kill him and yeah they like tear him apart yeah shaka smiles my notes say cool sick good revenge rules yeah yeah this this is a big this is the movie giving a thumbs up to revenge within that context of yeah no if you if you train child soldiers the child soldiers are gonna kill you. That's much of a muchness with Shaka. At this point, we go back to Minwi

and Awa, who... Yeah, nobody gets on that about, like, oh, what if you kill him, you'll become him. It's like, no, fuck him! I think it's over, it's over a bit of time, you know? Yeah, and also, they're children! Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true. Oh, it's fine for children to murder people!

God, I forgot! Yeah, that's legal. That's been made legal. I didn't realise there was a statute of limitations on them! They're child soldiers! It's legal to fucking frag a commanding officer! It's legal. Yeah, that's fine!

That's fine. They go and check in on Yuns and Sephirah. I love this bit where Minwi opens the door, he sees two of the fuckin' giant spirits on top of Yuns, tearing him apart. Yuns goes, help me, Mr. Minwi! Minwi just- Nope! This is a bit much for me, sorry.

I'm magic, but I'm not that magic. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Sephira runs out and we get some horrifying eye trauma, which I always love to see in a movie. You know, a botched laser eye surgery. Awa has to, like, comfort her. Sephira has, like, by virtue of seeing them devour you, and has lost her sight, and then she dies in her arms too.

Which is a good point for me, I think, to very briefly talk about final girls, and about how generally speaking in Western horror you would expect the lighter skinned woman in this sequence to be the one who survives and makes it to the end, and the darker-skinned one to get tragically killed in a way that we all feel very bad about. So this is a nice reversal, you know? Especially because Awa is more vulnerable as a mutant deaf woman. In a lot of films, she would have died. They would have exploited her disability and she would have died, you know? I have another thought about disability which is coming along in a second, but... So Shaka and Rafa get back to the camp, where they find that Minwi has held every single

spirit sort of, like, to himself. He has, like, got them in a clinch spiritually speaking and he's just sitting like perfectly still cross-legged under a tree with like all of these like swirling above his head it's a really striking shot done and it's under a bow bow but you're fucking right yeah it's underneath aism! Previously, we had seen bones possibly leading back. These were probably the sacrificed children's bones

right next to another Baobab surrounded by these fly-looking creatures. It's like this thing of a big thing I picked up from the film was this is a perversion of spirituality. In actually West African cultures, a lot of up from the film was this is a perversion of spirituality like because uh in in actually west african cultures a lot of them are muslim and muslims don't necessarily believe in ghosts

usually our big spiritual thing uh from is is jinn actually right but like this and atlantics by uh another job who i believe her name is mat Joe, the director there of that film, which also features the Senegalese version of the supernatural, introduces more the concept of ghosts, of something, of haunting, which I was fascinated by. It's a completely modern thing to introduce to,

not necessarily to introduce the Senegalese cinema, but to adapt this but to adapt our spirituality and understanding of the supernatural to a more international understanding, where obviously, I must have watched a bunch of Westerns that dealt with ghosts and whatnot. Sure, yeah. makes me think of uh like high plains drifter is the other movie that i wanted to reference in this uh which is uh again literally your legacy of violence it is your your marshal who has been killed returns to avenge himself to avenge his own death um yeah the thomas thompson yeah yeah yeah well i mean that is that, that is literally an African ghost story. Yeah, I didn't throw that out as an in. Yeah. Like, Zeevon mentions fucking Biafra there, actually.

So Shaka and Rafa are forced to kill Minwi, though, in order to make their escape, and it's this huge emotional moment. We get the second instance of like a character screaming being replaced with a musical sting what's good what's what's also really good yeah what i've loved was that minui is concentrating very hard he's holding these spirits and he talks to the two of them in sign language and the fact that we've got a movie where like four of the main characters the four main characters all speak sign, all speak sign language, and it's not important, it's just a thing that they can all do. It's just lovely. I really, really like that. but both as a piece of like action movie dialogue but also uh spiritually um so at this point they still have to flee they still have to like they've gotten the fuel at this point i'm like

okay what so like the rules of his magic weren't like really explained i didn't really know how he did that and like i'm like if this worked then why did they have to run? Because it didn't. Because he does try to trap the spirits inside of him, but the film does keep going back and back again to the idea of you're not meant to keep things inside of you. Especially, you know, and it's like Minui tries his best. He's just saving them time. Salomon at the beginning, Shaka asks him, how do we fight these things? He's like, Minui tries his best. He's just saving them time. Salomon, at the beginning,

Shaka asks him how do we fight these things. He's like, you don't. You run. Which I like. Also, knives. They've got to get in the boat. And of course, the fear of water, which now sort of becomes more obvious

that this is not a fear. This is not a sort of an anxiety obvious that this is not a fear. This is not a sort of, an anxiety response, this is a spiritual response that you're having to getting on the water. Exactly. But what I like is, Rafa's like, grab Shaka and he literally tells him, brother, you're going on a boat. And, honestly, if I travelled like that, I think I would probably be a bit better about traveling. The thing that I like about this, right, is this is a disability, this is an impediment,

right? In this case, it's like a spiritual debt that we're about to see. But he gets in the boat, he is shaking, he is totally incapacitated. I think, in a Western movie movie this would be the moment where you like oh you have to like conquer your fear in this moment you have to like get over it and he fucking doesn't his friends have to accommodate this thing that he cannot do by like physically moving him it's i really like that i really like that like you let a heroic character be vulnerable yeah our wraps him in the little trauma blanket and then just holds him and how and i i was like yeah emotional at

this point i was just like oh because no like genuinely like the idea of him having like if he had manned up here as people like to say and gotten over his fear of of like water it's like that wouldn't be emotionally as resonant to me because it's like what would what would he like what is the reason that he is able to get over this this is a man incapable of moving on he literally came back to the one place he should not have come back and that also would have impoverished his relationship with the other two characters exactly and like if like because chaka came back just to kill remington he did not know that the other boys were hostage there you

know but as as we've if we've understood anything from the sort of the the spiritual language of this film you're not gonna fucking row out of this situation um i would i would simply row out revenge is a river i would simply row that river. I would simply not drown. RIP to Chaka, but I'm different. It does what supernatural horror or terror, of course, in this case,

is supposed to add to it, which is it's a fundamentally extremely human story that utilizes the supernatural to drive home the themes. And the theme, I'm afraid, for my man, Mr. Chaka, is don't fucking do that. Vengeance is a river. Vengeance is circular.

And the only way to get to the bottom of it is when you fucking drown and they're on a river right now. We see finally the flashback in full, which is he is a child. He escapes into the river with this pistol, and the river takes him. Like, hands come up from the river and take him. And the implication is, I believe pretty unambiguously, that the deal that he has made for his freedom, for his escape,

is his vengeance, right? That he is gonna come back and he is gonna kill Omar. And guess who's back? Omar, flaming eyes at this point, clearly dead, tries to get in the boat and is like, yeah, no, you're fuckin' coming with me. Yes! Because Omar's gone, you're him now. Exactly!

It's... Buddy! That's a fuckin' cinema. because Omar's gone you're him now it's that's a fucking cinema and you have to remember that throughout the entire film after other than the time he takes him off to reveal that he has

R branded onto the backs of his hands Chaka is always wearing this glove right right? Even after the people who love him finally know this deep traumatic thing that's been holding him back this entire time, he still feels the need to hide. And we're told that at the beginning of the film, that hiding is going to get you killed, right? Because we also see that Shaka, as a boy, when Shaka walks into the river, he walks in with, in his left hand, he's wearing chains, he's holding chains, and in the right hand, the Remington, right? So it's this little, I thought like when Alice brought up the

idea of this deal, that this ambiguous deal made between the spirits and chaka as a young boy of like we will give you liberty your freedom but here's your vengeance do not come back here you know what you know what will happen if you try to get revenge and chaka just fucks that up i love it well he doesn't really have a choice is the thing like the the way the way the narration frames it is uh revenge is like a river but there's a line that i didn't mention which is our actions are like the the canoes that are like being you know moved by the current um and his you know his actions aren't really his own he has to fulfill this thing uh it's it's it's because curses man they'll fucking get you he finally gets pulled into the river

by this entity and he's like reaching out Awa grabs his hand but because he's still wearing the gloves like you mentioned because he refuses to finally like accept this he just slips out of her hand

and that's the fucking film no not exactly. There's, which I was so perplexed by, because Go on, hit me with the final shot. The last shot, I think, weakens the message, because I think it's an import

of your western fairytale thing of, like, curses easily defeated by simply being pure of heart he sacrifices himself right what happens is uh a wave of the sort of the the particles of these spirits like wash over them and the fuck it he changes the movie's color grading it goes back to being the like it's actually the first time that we see the river in as like vibrant color as it actually is it's always been kind of muted and like grayed and yellowed throughout the whole movie

and this is the first time we see it in full color we see rafa and our in full color in sunlight in daylight instead of with like artificial lighting. And it's used really strikingly, but I tend to interpret that as, the curse is now lifted because Shaka has sacrificed himself and he is pure of heart, and revenge is a good thing, and all of this other stuff. I think that kind of ruins the message a little bit. I think it's better, it's stronger, if the message is yeah revenge doesn't end and it just it continues and the curses aren't separable from the land and the land isn't separable from the people or its history and it it's all just going down to the same place i like that better i would

have honestly preferred if it had ended right when our screams but her voice is replaced by the musical sting as you said i thought that would have been a perfect ending for the film. Not any of the... because Shaka's just died. We've just seen this entire... it's very obvious that Shaka is going to die trying to get revenge. That happens, and then we see the sad moment, and then it ends. I thought that would have been more... Yeah, it would have been stronger. That's probably why I mentally forgot about the last shot

I was like it's a good film Done It is a good film Those are my couple of criticisms of it but in general I really enjoyed watching it and I'm not really a huge horror movie person but I really enjoyed it

I mean I'm still saying that Revenge good like it's good actually it's good to kill people who who keep child soldiers it's good that the child soldiers killed him um i am sad it comes as a cost well no that no because seriously if you think about like have you ever considered that someone who uses child soldiers perhaps was a child soldier themself at one point? Yeah, yeah. I think the position that the movie takes isn't that revenge is a bad thing, or that, like, I think it takes the position that revenge incurs a debt.

Exactly, exactly. And maybe that debt is worth paying, but you have to do it, and the debt is always really quite severe. Which is... it's a good theme. An eye for an eye is fuckin' sick, actually, yeah. I have two eyes! When you go into search of revenge, dig two graves, one for the person you're gonna kill, and one as a spare!

As a backup! Yeah, free bonus grave. It's a secret grave for a thing we'll need later. I'm gonna kill and what is a spare as a backup yeah free bonus grave it's a secret grave for a thing i'm gonna kill way more than two people well i mean do we have any sort of like closing thoughts about about saum as a movie i have so many i had questions it is really well made like as a piece of film and like i i i was sadly not the ideal audience but like as scenes shots music loved it i i need it's missing the point so much but i need the hyenas yeah no i need it yeah right right immediately like even even just there's a bit of a hint that rafa and our will become like

the new hyenas because she makes it explicitly clear that she wants to become one of them and i would i would even take a sequel i would even take a sequel with just rafa and i'm like i don't know fuck they go fix the gambia or some shit i don't know whatever yeah they take revenge which is cool to specify that would be against you people in this case yeah of course I watched RRR and I loved it

please take revenge against the whites we welcome all acts of anti-colonial resistance that is correct well this has been an absolute fucking treat ML if the people want more of you, where can they find you? I'm on Twitter as KijeraL.

That's K-E-J-E-R-A, the letter L. I'm one of those writers who I have a bunch of stuff published, but I'm too lazy to set up a website. If you're interested in my writing, I write a bunch about the cultures we've discussed here, particularly in my fiction. Just Google my name. You'll find some shit. But what you should especially check out, particularly if you watch the film and you're wondering, what are they eating during these dinner scenes? You should check out my mother's you should check out my mother's my

mother's youtube channel um day tida's kitchen that's day n d e y tida t i d a and you know you should probably know how to spell kitchen and um the the meal that i would not i would not overestimate in the description don't worry thank you. And the meal they eat in the first dinner scene is chou. T-H-I-O-U, but pronounced like chou. And it's like a sauce dish with rice. My mother has a version of it with, I believe, fish balls, which you should check out on her YouTube channel. Yeah.

This is now a cooking show. You can cook along with Killjames1. Yeah! Yeah! So, do all of that, thank you for subscribing to the Patreon, or not subscribing to the Patreon, because this one's free! Because of the winter of content. But if you're not, maybe consider it. Maybe do that.

Maybe do a lot of things. In the meantime, we will be back with a very special halloween episode i've i've done a double dip i've i've made a choice this time you have you made an executive decision that we're gonna do not the movie executive decision that's coming later we're doing a little movie called jennifer's body so fuck yes excited for that it's so it's so good literally i'll be just posting a group chat yo we, we should do Jennifer's body at some point. And then like four hours later, I was like, do you want to do a Halloween special?

And she was like, yeah, Jennifer's body. And I'm like, oh yeah, of course. Done. Nice and easy. Asked and answered. Well, I'm going to go and dig a bunch of graves. I'm going to go buy some more Versace. See you boys.

Bye everyone. I've got this big gun that I need to go buy some more Versace. Take some revenge. See you boys. Bye everyone. I've got this big gun that I need to go and shoot a man with. Thank you for listening to The Cerebral Zone as we discuss a movie that's actually good. And we're not going to fucking stop anytime soon because the next movie is also pure force banger. Jennifer's Body. That is right. And then following that

we will be doing another Q&A because it has been a second. It's been a hard second. As of course this is the winter of content. You can listen to all of these episodes for zero pounds and zero cents,

zero dollars and zero kronen. But if you have spares of any of this kind of currency, in the description of this episode will be a number of charities and strike funds that you can toss some dollars towards. I'm going to be posting this episode while I'm in London on holiday, so I won't have access to my computer to update you on ballots. So for God's sake, if you are in a union, just go ahead and double check that you don't have a ballot coming up, because we would hate to be given the opportunity to say, yes, I want to strike and forget to do it,

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