Dreams of Dust

Dreams of Dust
2006/86 min/ French/ Burkina Faso, Canada, France
Official Selection 2007 Sundance Film Fesival

Cast and Crew
Starring: Makena Diop as Mocktar
Rasmané Ouedraogo as Thiam
Fatou Tall-Salgues as Coumba
Director of Photography: Crystel Fournier
Editor: Annie Jean
Writer/ Director: Laurent Salgues

From France, Canada and Burkino Faso, French writer-director Laurent Salgues’s Rêves de poussière is a vivid depiction of hard labor, sustained by hopes for a better future, and poverty. Mocktar, a Nigerian farmer, has just lost his youngest daughter. Burdened by guilt for inadequately providing for wife and family, he travels to northeast Burkino Faso to work in the gold mines. An official explains, “The gold rush is over.” His response gets Mocktar hired: “I’m just looking for a job.”
The film opens with an extreme long-shot of sand being blown by wind screen-right across the landscape. A human figure enters the frame and proceeds, by foot, screen-left—in the face of the wind. This is Mocktar symbolically braving life’s misfortunes. Neocolonialist exploitation of African resources and peasants contributes to African poverty. “The gold we risk our lives for,” Mocktar himself notes later on, “is for white people.” At the camp, Mocktar is attracted to Coumba, who has lost family members in a shaft collapse there, and whose young daughter Mocktar helps with his pay, redeeming himself from guilt over his own recent loss. At the last, in an extreme long-shot, he is shown journeying home.
Much of the film is given over to showing, in documentary fashion, the harsh, dangerous labor involved in different facets of the mining. (Mocktar, his first day, suffers a horrible accident.) We also see Mocktar’s after-work interactions with an older miner who takes Mocktar under his wing; but when this gentleman replaces the bullying, uncaring boss, we see the start of his transformation into a facsimile of that boss—black against black at the behest of white interests: an appropriation of available limited power.
Cinematographed by Crystel Fournier, images are hauntingly dreamlike. Wind-swept dust is a recurrent motif.