Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 560

An interview with the makers of 'Quel Souvenir,' a film about an oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon

Twelve years after ground was first broken on an oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon, the documentary film, Quel Souvenir explores the impact of this World Bank sponsored project on local communities from inland Chad to the Cameroonian coast. While the World Bank and oil companies like Exxon and Chevron promised local development along the lines of clean drinking water, school buildings and electricity, the filmmakers find displaced farmers, environmental degradation and local communities left in a state of disarray. Demonstrating a "cautionary tale" of a so-called well intentioned development project gone wrong, the film walks the thin line between presenting the talking heads who can speak to the context and politics of the situation, and everyday farmers, fishermen and families that live day to day with the consequences of the project. The film is currently in its final stages of post-production. Last summer I saw a rough cut of the film here New York City and asked the director Danya Abt (DA) if I could interview her. Together with one of the film's executive producers, Valéry Nodem (VN), they answered my questions. Before we get to the questions and answers, here's the trailer.

Why Quel Souvenir? What inspired the project in the first place?

VN: Africa is endowed with a lot of natural resources that attract a lot of foreign investments. But Africans remain very poor, and see the resources leave their countries without any return in terms of development, improvements in their life standards, etc. "Quel Souvenir" was a case study to show how massive investments promoted by the world most powerful corporations and multilateral institutions have been a curse when happening in places where systems are very weak in terms of contract negotiation, environmental and social policies, social justice, etc. The Chad Cameroon pipeline was the largest private investment project in Sub-Saharan Africa, and was promoted by ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Petronas, a consortium of very powerful companies. The project crossed Chad, at the time one of the poorest countries in the world and Cameroon, at the time the most corrupted country in the world. Voices all over the world asked for the project to be postponed so that these countries can build their institutions and their capacity to manage such a large project, but the companies and the World Bank pushed and move forward. As a result, almost 10 years after oil from Doba in Chad was pumped and transported to hungry international markets, thousands of poor farmers and families in Chad and Cameroon are still waiting to receive a compensation for losses they endured from the pipeline crossing their homes, farms and other livelihoods. The whole idea of "Quel Souvenir" is to give a voice to those who are the most affected by projects like the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, but never properly consulted.

DA: The name "Quel Souvenir" is a reference to something we saw all up and down the pipeline route—farmers who had lost mango groves or access clean drinking water due to construction of the pipeline would use receive sheets of corrugated metal as compensation for their loss, put a new roof on their house and write "Souvenir du Pipeline" across it. One man we interview in the film received an ESSO (Exxon-Mobile's parent company) backpack as a reward for reporting an oil spill on his land. In contrast to the promises that were made before construction began—long-term jobs, schools buildings, paved roads, electricity—the actual souvenirs of the pipeline are pathetic.

Who is the main audience of this film?

VN: The film is an educational tool primarily addressed to anybody interested to learn about where some of the oil we pump in our cars is produced, how it impacts other people lives, and how we as final consumers have a role to play. More specifically, it targets civil society groups in the [global] South mobilizing communities to claim their rights, researchers, universities, and the large public.

DA: Quel Souvenir raises fundamental concerns about the nature of "development" projects backed by the World Bank and sends up a red flag for any country that is considering one. It is also a cautionary tale about the enormous impactive of the extractive industries and resonates strongly with those concerned about the environmental impact of an enormous project currently being considered in the U.S., the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The film visits local communities along the Chad-Cameroon border to demonstrate how the oil pipeline has impacted local communities? How did this type of narrative style come about during the shooting of the film?

DA: The producers of the film, Brendan Schwartz and Valery Nodem, were both civil society members working in Cameroon and had been working on issues of compensation around the pipeline for many years. They had good relationships with village leadership and people claiming compensation so it wasn't difficult to find the stories we were looking for. Although there was usually no way to contact a village in advance to let them know we were coming—somebody might have a cell phone but often not—we were warmly welcomed everywhere we went.

Having really excellent access to firsthand accounts of the pipeline and a huge number of stories and wonderful storytellers to choose from, we decided to structure the story around the personal narratives of the people whom the pipeline most effected.

Can you talk about some of the challenges in portraying the lives of local communities impacted by the pipeline versus bringing in "experts" in economics and politics that could explain the situation?

DA: Quel Souvenir is a film that stays local while telling a global story. If anything positive came out of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline it is that it greatly strengthened the need for and the capacity of local civil society organizations. The "experts" of the film are those Chadian and Cameroonian civil society members who understand the context and the global implications of the project, and they provide the thread that stitches the story together.

The film documents an economic project financed by the World Bank that started in 2000. How have things changed since you were filming on the ground? What type of challenges do you face in producing a film that is up to date with an ongoing situation that the population in North America and the Global North, it would seem, know very little about?

VN: Since we filmed on the ground about 3 years ago, there have been a lot of changes. Many farmers and communities that we interviewed were compensated, because we brought back from the trip all along the pipeline hundreds of complaints from communities and put them on the face of COTCO, the company representing the consortium in charge of exploiting the pipeline. Also, Chadian and Cameroonians recently filed a complaint with the IFC, the financial arm of the World Bank, and they have been vsiting countries, and will make recommendations which for most of them will fix some of the projects actions that violated World Bank Directives. This is a very positive thing as well. We can also mention the fact that communities are more aware of their rights, as some projects are crossing areas where the pipeline passed as well, and local communities are fighting for stronger regulations and treatement because they "learned the lesson".

First, we did the film after working for years with a lot of organizations in the US and Europe very active around extractive issues and their impacts on local communities. Most of them were working in their own context already to raise awareness, so that people will be better informed around these issues. Second, people in the global North are more connected to these issues than they think they are, and tools like Quel Souvenir can help to show the link between people here and people there, so that consumers can act on this side of the ocean asking for the respect of people's dignity.

What do you ultimately hope viewers will feel and do after seeing the film?

VN: Our hope was that people seeing the film will be educated about this issue, will make the clic and say "That's the gas we put in our cars everyday, we can't tolerate this!" The US government is planning to have 25% of its oil come from Africa by 2025, and people in the US can support efforts demanding better regulations and transparency around the oil sector, which is still very opaque and not benefiting African people.

We were also hoping that viewers will be more active and inclined to find more information about this project and similar projects in Africa and other parts of the world, to see the pattern.

DA: Divest from fossil fuels—ride a bike, buy local goods, and if you have investments look closely at them and make sure you're not profiting off of the misfortune of others.

What can we hope for next? Is there a theatrical or DVD release in the works?

DA: We are currently fundraising to complete the fine cut of the film and will be doing the film festival circuit later this year. For more information on how to support the film and future screenings, visit our website quelsouvenir.com or contact Danya Abt.

* Adam Esrig studied international affairs at The New School and lives in Brooklyn. He also contributed to The Encyclopedia of South Africa (2011) and co-authored an essay on African film with Sean Jacobs.

Music Break. Jeri-Jeri

Berlin based Dub and Techno producer Mark Ernestus (check his previous work with Rhythm and Sound) fell in love with Mbalax (how could you not?), went to Senegal, found a band, and produced a collection of songs for release on Honest Jons records.

The first release is Mbeuguel Dafa Nekh from the group Jeri-Jeri (led by Bakane Seck) featuring Mbene Diatta Seck. Since I've been experimenting with my own ideas of Club-Mbalax, the Mbalax Dub version has got me too excited!

The Toto 'Africa' Meme, N°4: The Europe Edition

I can't lie, Europeans love Toto's "Africa." First up there's the massive Slovenian a capella choir Perpetuum Jazzile (above) that has been viewed more than 12 million times (when I last counted earlier this week) on Youtube where it attracts comments like "unusual and interesting" or "the two women to our right of the main male singer are hot;" then there's the Dutch street organ (imagine what Toto would have sounded like in the 19th century), a German trio, and the devotion of Serbian fans who decided to subtitle the original.

* BTW, following our earlier meme posts, blogger and musicologist Wayne & Wax felt inspired to write a long post about the "Africanness" of the actual tune. Some of his readers dug up a Senegalese rap cover (Ethan Zuckerman is a hip hop head?!), a Ghostface vs Toto remix and a rap over the credits of American TV show, "Community," by actual rapper Donald Glover and Betty White.

NBA player Serge Ibaka has no country

Last year we pointed to the fact that sports commentators, statisticians and journalists can't distinguish the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC) from its neighbor the Republic of Congo every time they talk about NBA basketball player Serge Ibaka. He was born in Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo, normally referred to as Congo-Brazzaville, not the DRC or what used to be known as Zaire (until 1997) and now commonly referred to by its initials or as Congo-Kinshasa. The only thing the two countries share is a river: the Congo (yeh, that river which  Conrad fictionalized). Earlier this week Deadspin, the American sports blog, pointed out that ESPN lists Ibaka's birthplace as "Brazzaville, Zaire." At least they know that Zaire still existed when Ibaka was born in 1989. But again it is the wrong country. Today I noticed they just deleted his country and his birthplace is now only listed as "Brazzaville." So now he has no country.

Anyway, he acquired a Spanish passport last year and now plays for Spain in international tournaments.

Film and Johannesburg's Ponte City

The German writer Norman Ohler described Johannesburg's Ponte City, Africa's tallest residential building, thus: "Ponte sums up all the hope, all the wrong ideas of modernism, all the decay, all the craziness of the city. It is a symbolic building, a sort of white whale, it is concrete fear, the tower of Babel, and yet it is strangely beautiful." A new documentary by Ingrid Martens, Africa Shafted, adds to the wide variety of cultural and artistic interest in Ponte, home to around 4000 people in Hillbrow, on the edge of downtown Johannesburg. The film purports to look at xenophobia through situating itself in the intense and somewhat claustrophobic surrounding of the tower lifts, which link the 52 stories, housing nationalities from all across Africa. In these lifts, the film encounters residents and their feelings toward one another. The trailer does indeed look interesting.

This isn't the first time artists have examined Ponte tower; this photographic series by Mikhael Subotzky depicts the residents in the lifts again; the cold steel behind them illuminating the differences in clothing and stance to quite powerful effect. The lifts, both in Africa Shafted and these photographs, become an awkward pod of public space, enclosed, forcing prejudices into close proximity.

As fellow AIAC blogger Tom Devriendt rightly pointed out, decaying buildings are beloved by artists and filmmakers working in or about Africa. A recent article in The (UK) Guardian by writer Brian Dillon examined a European tradition of 'ruin lust' — our fondness for decay in culture; whether post-war city ruins speaking of great war and trauma in Europe, the rubble of decaying buildings signifying a rich history, or, in the case of African states, the decay of buildings that symbolized a promise of a better, independent future, that now sit squatted and corroded, a testament to the difficulties of post-colonial reality.

Akosua Adoma Owusu's film 'Drexciya,' included in our Top Ten Films list of 2011, is an interesting experimental approach to decay and ruin in Ghana's once glitzy 'riviera' in Accra. Around the brink of a once-grand swimming pool, Owusu re-animates the pool through the use of sound; laughter and splashing water hauntingly remind of a cultural history now replaced by another, quieter one; women hang their washing on the bushes that surround the pool, a man stores his belongings somewhere on the periphery. It's not 'ruin lust', but perhaps 'ruin intrigue', taking the symbols of decay and reanimating them within a current cultural context, rather than pining for a promise never fulfilled, or lost.

Other films, which focus on decaying buildings, include Night Lodgers by Licinio Azevedo, a documentary about the decaying Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique.

Lotte Stoof's Grande Hotel, also about the landmark hotel in Beira, Mozambique.

Finally, different, but related, is François Verster's film Sea Point Days, a documentary about the changing clientele of a swimming pool, once reserved for whites under Apartheid, now a melting pot of different races, classes and ages.

Rare: Conscious Kwaito

South African house kwaito with an explicit message: we don't get to hear it often. Shota's Etshwaleni has been playing in clubs for months, I'm told. Its straightforward lyrics make it stand out: have fun while still respecting others ("hlonipheni abanye abantu") and drink responsibly ("pasop ugu dakwa") during sleepless ("asisalali") weekends. But you figured that much from the video.

Germany has a version of GQ magazine

A woman in Germany removes her clothes and poses for a magazine photographer with her famous boyfriend. Her boyfriend's father happens to be Tunisian and the pictures are reprinted in Tunisia. Three journalists are arrested in Tunis and charged with "violating public morals by publishing a nude photograph." It would be fair to say that in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, nudity provokes a wide-range of responses. The boyfriend in this story happens to be Real Madrid's German midfielder Sami Khedira, and the girlfriend is Lena Gercke, a model.

Presumably, it's not the photograph of the goateed Khedira loafing around shirtless on a sofa in tight white pants (below) that has caused the stramash, but the one, above, from the cover of German GQ in which Gercke is wearing nothing at all while Khedira, standing behind her in a natty tux, has helpfully deployed what can only be described as a one-armed hand-bra.

My initial hope was that the Tunisian police were simply expressing their dismay at the old fully-clothed-man-with-stark-naked-woman magazine-cover cliché, and might demand that in future shoots Khedira should show off even more of his sculpted chest. Sadly it seems their beef was with Gercke's nakedity alone, and they don't see that the hand-bra makes any difference.

The star footballer, his naked girlfriend and Tunisia's new moral crusaders

A woman in Germany removes her clothes and poses for a magazine photographer with her famous boyfriend. Her boyfriend's father happens to be Tunisian and the pictures are reprinted in Tunisia. Three journalists are arrested in Tunis and charged with "violating public morals by publishing a nude photograph." It would be fair to say that in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, nudity provokes a wide-range of responses. The boyfriend in this story happens to be Real Madrid's German midfielder Sami Khedira, and the girlfriend is Lena Gercke, a model.

Presumably, it's not the photograph of the goateed Khedira loafing around shirtless on a sofa in tight white pants (below) that has caused the stramash, but the one, above, from the cover of German GQ in which Gercke is wearing nothing at all while Khedira, standing behind her in a natty tux, has helpfully deployed what can only be described as a one-armed hand-bra.

My initial hope was that the Tunisian police were simply expressing their dismay at the old fully-clothed-man-with-stark-naked-woman magazine-cover cliché, and might demand that in future shoots Khedira should show off even more of his sculpted chest. Sadly it seems their beef was with Gercke's nakedity alone, and they don't see that the hand-bra makes any difference.

Tunisia's new moral crusaders

A woman in Germany removes her clothes and poses for a magazine photographer with her famous boyfriend. Her boyfriend's father happens to be Tunisian and the pictures are reprinted in Tunisia. Three journalists are arrested in Tunis and charged with "violating public morals by publishing a nude photograph." It would be fair to say that in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, nudity provokes a wide-range of responses. The boyfriend in this story happens to be Real Madrid's German midfielder Sami Khedira, and the girlfriend is Lena Gercke, a model.

Presumably, it's not the photograph of the goateed Khedira loafing around shirtless on a sofa in tight white pants (below) that has caused the stramash, but the one, above, from the cover of German GQ in which Gercke is wearing nothing at all while Khedira, standing behind her in a natty tux, has helpfully deployed what can only be described as a one-armed hand-bra.

My initial hope was that the Tunisian police were simply expressing their dismay at the old fully-clothed-man-with-stark-naked-woman magazine-cover cliché, and might demand that in future shoots Khedira should show off even more of his sculpted chest. Sadly it seems their beef was with Gercke's nakedity alone, and they don't see that the hand-bra makes any difference.

The Daily Beast and Egypt's art revolution

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Last month the Daily Beast decided that Cairo had lost its voice. It's a political insurrection (or something), not a commercial for cough medicine. One suspects this means the sound of the traffic heard by the correspondent from on taxi journeys between the airport, hotel, meetings, dinner and airport. What about the suburbs which corral the city? This is a commonplace for writing about cities in developing countries; the overwhelming noise of the city, this truism dictates, has deprived its inhabitants the self-expression you see in the hushed sanctuary of a Western metropolis. Writing about the Arab Spring often conveniently forgets that cities in America and the UK have witnessed an array of diverse and innovative acts of police aggression against protesters.

Now, the Beast has tried to characterise a 'threat to contemporary art' by Egyptian 'Islamists'. They quote Weaam El-Masry, who is concerned, no doubt rightly, that her sketches of globular naked women will provoke negative reactions from conservatives. The suggestion, however, that these works are 'risque by almost any standards' is untrue. Dark allusions to potential 'Islamist' aggression does not serve the art community, who remain committed to representing themselves.

Events in the last year have raised some important questions and some real challenges to art: can a vibrant community be sustained while self-expression is restricted by a political elite, education system, widespread poverty and conservativism? Since the revolution, the country – and Cairo in particular – has seen a significant influx of foreign journalists in search of artists. Things like 'The Noise of Cairo' – a documentary (which interviews some of the artists I've mentioned in recent posts) by German filmmaker, Heiko Lange, seem to celebrate 2011 as a new opportunity for artistic self-expression. And yet a widespread conclusion in the international media finds revolutionary art embarrassingly straightforward. The truth is probably more complex – although the best art of the post-Mubarak era has not yet been made, the revolution has posed some difficult and valuable problems which are already being worked through. Suggestions that making art is impossible in Egypt are unhelpful, and journalism that dramatises Egyptian self-expression as a stifled scream is deeply suspect.