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"Coconut Head Generation", the youth rebelling in Nigeria
"Coconut Head Generation", documentary by Alain Kassanda, presented at the Cinéma du réel. © Alain Kassanda / Ajímátí Films
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
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In competition at the Cinéma du réel festival, the documentary "Coconut Head Generation" tells the story of a film club at the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria. The director Alain Kassanda documents how this cinema is gradually transformed into a place of gathering and discussion that will also feed the revolt of students in the street. Maintenance.
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RFI: Coconut Head Generation, what's behind this title that sounds so funny and enigmatic?
Alain Kassanda: The title comes from an expression in Nigeria that is a form of insult. "Coconut Head" refers to someone who is hollow-headed and narrow-minded. Except that this generation of young Nigerians has reclaimed the stigma to claim their stubborn side and is fighting for a better future, against the older generation that monopolizes power and prevents them from developing fully.
Your film is a tribute to a film club like no other, the film club at the University of Ibadan. Is it a tribute to the strength of cinema in general?
Completely. The film shows the strength of cinema, a medium that allows people to live the same experience for a given time. And, then, to decide together what they do with this experience. In this case, these students here can see films that talk about what it does to them as spectators, but also as citizens. It is the citizen aspect that is important. That's what makes community. And there is a word that becomes performative, because it remains only in the precincts of the room, but it is also in the street to demand a better future, better governance, the end of police violence and so on...
You were born in Kinshasa, Congo, at the age of 13 you are leaving with your family in France. How does a Franco-Congolese end up at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria?
It is a coincidence. My partner is an anthropologist. She found a job in Ibadan. And I followed him as a companion. I was a housewife for four years. And I'm passionate about cinema. Before leaving, I was a cinema programmer. When I arrived in Ibadan, I met a teacher, a PhD student and a group of students. Together, we set up a film club. Little by little, this film club grew, a new group of students arrived, very politicized, very cinephile. And there, I took my camera and filmed what was happening and what was being said. And how they organized the film club themselves. The film was born like that.
The challenge after university is often to put theory into practice. For you, is the challenge of cinema to put something into practice after the end of the screening?
The first challenge of the film is already to show realities that are not known here. Nigeria is the most populous country on the African continent and it is the leading economic power. If we did a poll – even in this movie theater – we don't know who can give you the essentials of this country, for example, the division of Nigeria. Who knows it's the Nigerian Naira? There is a great deal of ignorance France the political, economic and social issues. The film gives voice to those who live there, to the protagonists. There is not an outside voice that will speak about them, it is they themselves who speak and who express themselves. That in itself is an important issue. Suddenly, we reclaim the narrative. And there is a representation that is different. We are not talking about terrorism, we are not talking about misery, but we are talking about politics and how we can build a society together. That's important.
Alain Kassanda, director of "Coconut Head Generation", at the Cinéma du réel. © Siegfried Forster / RFI
In the film club, we see that discussions about cinema always spill over into society. Is that why you were "obliged" to follow the student movement during the street demonstrations?
My approach was really to document what was happening. I made the film from the material I had. As it happens, while I was following this project, there was a movement happening that no one had been able to imagine. When I filmed the students of 2019, I had no idea that, a year later, there would be such an important social movement. So, in the end, the film is the result of events as I experienced them and as I documented them. I wasn't in Nigeria during a screening in 2020, so Tobi, one of the film club students, filmed the footage of the protests in Nigeria. This film is a co-construction between me, the filmmaker, and Tobi, protagonist, but also filmmaker whose images feed the film. This is also what is important in my approach, it is that there is a notion of equality between filmer and filmed. We live the same thing and we share the same desires, the same aspirations.
Your documentary is made up of all kinds of images, sometimes filmed with a hand-held camera, sometimes you use screenshots from Instagram or images from the Internet. Can we talk about a millefeuille of images?
Yes, there are several image registers: there are archive images. The film opens with an archive of the University of Ibadan from 1952. There are images from the Internet, film excerpts, as it is a film club, we also show excerpts from films that students see. There is a mise en abyme of the spectator who sees people seeing the films. And then there are images of student mobilization. It is the bone structure of the film that allows to tell in a way that is both chronological, but also plastic. There are typologies of images that are different. This gives all its salt to the film. All the flesh of the film comes from there too.
"Coconut Head Generation", documentary by Alain Kassanda, presented at the Cinéma du réel. © Alain Kassanda / Ajímátí Films
Your film is also reminiscent of Rafiki Fariala's documentary: Nous étudiants !, a dive on the campus of the University of Bangui, in the Central African Republic. Do you agree with Fariala that cinema is at the forefront of changing things and building the future through youth?
Unfortunately, I haven't seen this movie, but I know what it's about. And I completely agree with that. It seems to me that he has the same approach, he shows others, outside, the student reality in the Central African Republic, like me, I show elsewhere the student reality in Nigeria. There is a willingness to be accountable and to give a voice to those who are experiencing the situation. This is a strongly political position, because it renews the representations and the imagination we have of these places.
You show Nigeria as a "democracy". What is the place of auteur cinema in this country between American blockbusters and Nollywood production?
It's very complicated, because the four years I spent in Nigeria, I didn't see any arthouse cinema from Nigeria in cinema. You should know that there is Nollywood, a very dynamic film industry in Nigeria. With TV series, but also cinema films that are released in theaters. This represents 20% of what comes out in theaters compared to 80% of American films that are released on screens. In this, there is no place for a globalized auteur cinema. You don't see Ousmane Sembène in a movie theater in Lagos or Ibadan. We are not going to see American, French or other auteur cinema. So, the film club also became a kind of cinematheque where students had access to films that were not visible elsewhere. I hope that in the coming years, Nigerian filmmakers will also initiate another auteur cinema, more formally demanding, to anchor this cinema in deeper social realities. Because Nollywood is also an elite cinema that looks at itself. And it's important to show other realities, like Italian cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Vittorio De Sicca was a popular cinema, and it showed the reality of the working classes. We need that in Nigeria today. But, I'm sure, it will come.
► Read also: Fespaco: the African Critics' Prize for "One Man's Show" by Nigerian director Aduaka Newton Ifeanyi
In your film, we do not see at any time a Nigerian arthouse film at the cine-club.
Yes, there is not. I do not want to say that there is no Nigerian auteur cinema, but there is little to which we have access. I think of Ola Balogun [born in 1945], a pioneer of Nigerian cinema. He made a film, Black Goddess (1978), between Brazil and Nigeria, but his films are difficult to access. The interesting filmmakers in Nigeria are not necessarily in Nigeria, they are in the United States. C.J. "Fiery" Obasi [born 1985] was with Juju Stories this year at Sundance, America's leading independent film festival. There are still filmmakers who are beginning to start this trajectory. But this is still too little for there to be a movement that is akin to a branch of Nigerian cinema that is other than Nollywood. But these are things that will inevitably happen.
Will your film be seen in Nigeria?
My ambition is to return to Nigeria, especially to Ibadan, in the film club, to show it to the students who are there, and I hope also in Lagos.
► Read also: Cinema of the real: Alassane Diago recalls the massacres of 1989 on the border between Mauritania and Senegal
► Read also: Nollywood at Fespaco: "start saying yes to your dreams"
► Read also: Nigerian cinema: Between Nollywood and African auteur cinema
► Cinéma du réel, 45th International Documentary Film Festival, from 24 March to 2 April, at the Centre Pompidou-Paris
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