19/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Luck Razanajaona puts Madagascar on the world cinema map with a debut fiction feature painting an illuminating portrait of the stormy climate which reigns and endures on this island

"Digging deep for some time, I tried to find my way. I know now that it’s not from stones that you get your worth, but from the brave souls who gave you their blood. Oh my country, Madagascar, I will strive to deserve you". With Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story, screened in the 74th Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section, Luck Razanajaona is providing "the red island" with its first ever selection for a major international festival courtesy of a local filmmaker. The film’s authentic roots, beneath its simple exterior, lend it a pure kind of charm as it paints a sharp portrait of the underbelly of a chaotic political-economic situation which invites all forms of trafficking and whose perilous democratic struggles are anything but recent.

Sifting the muddy earth in search of sapphires, young Kwame (Parista Sambo) and his friend Rivo (Dominique Toditsara) dream of the future: specifically, leaving for France, travelling the world, or returning home to Tamatave to buy a huge plot of land and build a house. But a police raid shatters their hopes to smithereens ("the land has been bought by foreigners") and Rivo loses his life in the process, a brutal death which Kwame feels responsible for and which takes him back to his father’s passing, during a protest when he was only a small child. So, ultimately, it’s with a coffin that Kwame returns home, after an eight-hour bus journey, crossing an island set ablaze by a post-electoral quarrel and passing pro-democracy demonstrators and militia fighting over the island’s streets and roads.

Once he arrives at the home of his mother (Laurette Ramasinjanahary), where he also finds photographer Babaa (Jérôme Oza), who was once a part of the music group Tout Puissant Africa Voice alongside Kwame’s father, our protagonist looks for work and starts to investigate his father’s past. It’s an investigation which soon has echoes in the present when he meets back up with a childhood friend (Joe Lerova) who now traffics rosewood, and when he encounters trade unionist Bezara (Drwina Razafimahaleo). But " it’s easy to get lost off the beaten track and tread on a snake, a killer snake"…

Attempting to capture the soul of Madagascar (its ancestral rites) and to make connections between eras so as to honour the island’s enduring spirit of resistance and denounce the collective chaos orchestrated to benefit the few, Luck Razanajaona delivers an engaged and highly enlightening film, making clever use of radio, songs and photos to fuel a very simple story. It’s a small theatre onto this world, in the guise of a coming-of-age tale, channelling universal ideas on oppression, corruption, revolution, and the dangerous choices which must be made to try to change things and find peace.

Produced by We Film (Réunion Island) in co-production with Africamadavibe (Madagascar), NiKo Film (Germany), Free Women Films (South Africa) and Caméléon Production (Mauritius), Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story is sold worldwide by French firm Sudu Connexion.

(Translated from French)