Programme 1

Vivre riche
Joël Akafou, Belgium, Burkina Faso and France, 2017, 53 min.

Shot in Abidjan, the nation’s capital, Vivre riche (2017) follows a group of young “brouteurs” as they extort money to white women on dating websites. Crammed into a room, bare-chested, they whisper love notes to their laptops. In-between screens, they have wild parties, discuss their dreams, make calculations, or expose their rationale to their disapproving families. After all, they are merely collecting the colonial debt. Isn’t it fair accounting? For months on end, the painstaking process of seduction goes on. Eyes rivetted on screen, sitting on the floor and cursing bad network: love really is hard work. Akafou’s camera participates in the virtual romances, meticulously observing the blurry silhouettes on screen, fingers typing, golden watches jangling on wrists. With their flamboyant names —Inza “La Haute Bourgeoisie Française”, Rolex “Le Portugais”—, the boys aspire to a mode of alternative social ascension popularized by coupé-décalé. The movement arose in the 2000’s on the nightclub scene at a time of political turmoil in Ivory Coast. It celebrates lavish lifestyle, ostentatious expenditures, of those who made it through cut and run —swindling (“couper” in Ivorian) and running away (“décaler”). Both beguiled and beguiling, the scammers reclaim consumer society, diaspora, colonial racket in an ambivalent form of resistance from within the system. Yet how does one escape mortuary politics without escaping family responsibilities? Akafou’s generous filmmaking follows his protagonists as they navigate these troubled waters, torn between tradition and a refusal to despair.

Jade de Cock de Rameyen