Winner of the contest “10 days for a film” edition 2019 organized by the Goethe Institut and the film festival Ecrans Noirs, Joseph Akama returns this year with a second short film “Into the Den”. A short more ambitious than the previous one on a technical and artistic level. The movie and will be screened on November 5, 2020 in Yaoundé on the occasion of the 24th edition of the Ecrans Noirs Festival. Joseph Akama gave us a long interview and spoke to us about the contours of this project and his vision of cinema.
Spoiler alert!
Interview conducted on October 24, 2020
I would like to bring a fresh air and set myself apart from the style of cinema we are used to seeing in Africa and Cameroon.
Ayila: You just finished shooting your second short, Into the Den, how was the shoot and what level are you at today ?
Joseph Akama: The shoot went like all shoots, not as planned! (laughs) It took a lot of improvisation, a lot of adaptation to meet my needs as a writer-director and also to meet the objectives that we had set with 103 Films and and the people who trusted us on the project.
In Into the Den (ITD), you take us into a universe well known by African audiences, witchcraft, but which is unfortunately rarely told by African filmmakers.
I would like to bring a fresh air and set myself apart from the style of cinema we are used to seeing in Africa and Cameroon. I would like to get away from dramas, trade show movies, comedies, pathos and extremely tragic movies. I’m a particular fan of thriller films, psychological films, films that explore different emotions and I think that’s kind of what you find yourself in ITD, it’s a fantastic thriller. I think the big challenge is to make films that are both entertaining, and smart. By smart I mean a movie where the director doesn’t take you for someone who doesn’t know how to watch a movie. The director doesn’t give you everything, he leaves holes, lets you fill those holes, he lets you discover the film; he leaves paratexts, signs, symbols, but obviously without making the film irrelevant to those who do not have these notions or who cannot go to the 2nd or 3rd degree of reading.
How did you come up with the idea for the film Into the Den ?
So this is very silly because ITD starts off with a question that I asked myself, what if I tell people my dreams? This is where it all started, I have dreams, we all have dreams and what we experience in those dreams doesn’t always make sense. In ITD there is a big question that I ask and I also provide the answer in the film : is witchcraft limited to Africans, is witchcraft limited to blacks ?
I love psychological films, I love themes that question humanity, that allow us to discover ourselves as humans.
Does witchcraft exist ?
I think the universe of the film is quite deadlocked and assumed too, from the start of the film we understand where I’m going. I don’t think the big question is does it exist because, well I’ll have to spoil the film a bit, there is a passage in the film where Boris (secondary character of the film played by Assala Kofane), says “you see that’s why I left you with your things there” that means that he admits that it exists, at one point Diana (played by Carola Dinnbier) also said “that could make a great movie all that”, it is not that she says that it does not exist but that it is not important to her. In ITD I actually question the universality of witchcraft, where do we find witchcraft nowadays and obviously I leave the answer to viewers.
Into The Den is your second short film after Western, both films were produced as part of the “10 days for a film” program. In western you take us into the head of a hero who builds an imaginary character, in ITD you take us into the second nature of people, into a kind of duality; it looks like you like to go beyond people’s appearances …
I love psychological films, I love themes that question humanity, that allow us to discover ourselves as humans, and perhaps to make an examination of conscience. In western we have precisely this character Kamdem who because he is troubled by society takes refuge in his own universe, he creates a character for himself who is in fact the representation of everything he would like to be. In ITD we have a character who tries to escape his past and he realizes that no matter where he goes he finds the same things, he finds out that maybe people are not who they are, he also find that people are not always what they seem to be.
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1. Assala Kofane
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The big problem in our cinema today is money.
Western was a psychological drama, Into The Den is a thriller that also imprints on psychology, the two films you wrote them, how do you leave one genre to another as a screenwriter-director ?
Changing genders isn’t the hardest part, maybe the hardest part would be changing universes and Western and ITD are in the same universe. It’s true that the genre has a big impact on the type of film we present. As a writer-director, I think that’s the case for everyone, we have this place where we’re comfortable and we can easily create. So quitting psychological drama to thriller, well I’ll say ITD is a psychological thriller, so leaving psychological drama to psychological thriller isn’t really a problem. In ITD I have taken on my paw and my mark a little more as a writer-director.
What was the big challenge in Into The Den as a director ?
Do with what we have! That was my biggest challenge in ITD. There are so many things that I wish I had that I didn’t. The shooting conditions are not always obvious. When we write the film, we put ourselves in the ideal conditions, we write the film of our dreams, we write the film we would like to shoot and obviously by directing we come back down to earth, we even rewrite and we do with what we have but sometimes it’s a little frustrating to know that even when coming back down to earth we may not have come down enough. The big problem in our cinema today is money. Money buys time and when you don’t have time for a project it’s bad because you have to be quick. For example, we shoot a night scene, we have to do it quickly before the day comes; we’re shooting a breakfast scene we have to do it quickly before the weather changes. It’s frustrating because it takes a lot of work, resistance, sacrifices and also creativity takes a hit. As a director I have to think and find a solution that is both creative and that serves the story and at the same time that is not weak. And you have to find that quickly because there are 20 people looking at you, saying “what do we do?” and it’s not always easy. Even if we’re going to say that we don’t have the lens we wanted, the camera, the lights, the set we wanted at least we should be able to shoot in conditions where we do not run after time.
The film Into The Den you had to make it in Germany but because of the pandemic you could not go there, how did you experience the confinement and how the work of readjustments of the film was done ?
The containment didn’t really bother me, I’m not someone who goes out a lot so it instead allowed me to focus on eg rewriting ITD, doing some research. If you think up a story in Douala and write a whole scenario based on your story in Douala there are things that are embedded in that story, Douala becomes a character in the story. So if you have to change Douala it’s a whole rewrite and you had to accept it. We had to accept the the film will no longer take place in Berlin, it is set in Yaoundé. Owona (main character played by Landry Beyeme) is no longer the Cameroonian who leaves his country to go to Germany but it is the Cameroonian who leaves his village to come to town. And obviously I will admit you the film took a hit. Maybe I should have actually given up to write another film that would have been built in Yaoundé that it would have been better because even writing even directing there are answers that will not be given because the film was changed along the way and it was not made as it was intended.
In ITD there is a lot of work in terms of costumes and sets. How did the collaboration with Laurita Ngringeh and Rosine Nkem go ?
With Rosine, she has been working on the film for over 6 months because even when Germany was still a possibility, I had already started working with her. We saw drawings, we did modeling exercises we talked a lot about how she saw creatures and how I saw them and she immediately got to work. Later when I told her that the film was going to be made in Cameroon, somewhere I think she was reassured because I can imagine for someone who creates and thinks something other people will use it. Isn’t very reassuring because you don’t know if they’re really going to do this right. It was still a huge job, Rosine didn’t sleep, she worked hardly. Laurita also really gave herself and she did a good job of costumes she knew how to combine the colors and the costumes with the characters. With Rosine and Eugène Soti (the Director of Photography) we worked on a color chart because I wanted us to have an idea of what the movie will look like and I think it worked when I watch the rushes and the pre-cut. I’m quite satisfied and I think we fought quite a bit.
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With passion and perseverance we can change the face of Cameroonian cinema.
In this film the characters seem to be prisoners of their evil nature, it was already the case in Western, because when you watch the film you have the impression that basically they don’t want to be these bad people but they are prisoners. of this evil nature, are you a fatalist?
Second nature can be understood in several degrees and I am quite a spiritual person, so there are things that I think I know, there are things that I take on and there is a message that i try to send in my movies. In Western we have this kid who splits up but he is not taken on, because in the end he regrets. Yet in ITD all the characters have a dual nature. There are those like Western who refuse to take responsibility and there are those who have accepted who they are and decide to live with it. I would like to let people make up their own mind but at my level I will say that as human beings we are not one, we are two we live in the physical world and we also live in the spiritual world. But nowadays the spiritual world is so put back to the point that it doesn’t matter, some people go about their physical life without thinking about their spiritual life, without thinking about the aftermath, it does not interest them in fact and in these two films there is this that I put forward, it is true without putting it on the face because I would like to stay enough subtle in my films. I don’t impose anything on people. I would always like to give people the openness and the possibility to make their own mind while watching the film. I won’t call it fatalism I just want to give clues I want to draw people’s attention to the spiritual side. Owona has a spiritual life that he leads and that he refuses, he evolves and he is called to do something he has a mission but he refuses to live this life because it frightens him which is not the case for the other two characters. In Western it’s less visible but there is a shot in Western and it’s my great regret today as a director is that this shot which was really important in the film a lot of people watch the film but do not realize. Or don’t pay attention it pains me a lot but it also motivates me more to work on my intentions to know how to insist on things that I would like people to notice, I am talking about this part in Western where Kamdem recovers the ‘weapon of his father we have the shadow of Western who does exactly the same thing but hey… It’s not fatalism I would just like to attract people to my universe.
What’s next for the film, what are the next steps ?
The very near future of the film is the screening at the Goethe Intitut on November 5 and obviously I would like to do a few festivals with the film, it will also allow others to show the film and make it more accessible to as many people as possible. I would like, with ITD, to say that as a Cameroonian filmmaker we can do it. As a Cameroonian filmmaker you have to be daring and start really making films, we can do it. With ITD it is not quite successful but it is promising it means that with passion and perseverance we can change the face of Cameroonian cinema. I don’t shoot other Cameroonian films, but I think we should start making films that dare, films that offer something special or new.
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