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 Lacote, from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, whose "Run" has had its
premiere at the Cannes International Festival in the "Un Certain
Regard" forum, said he became a filmmaker because the incident
led him to realize that cinema exists at the "fine boundary"
between the mystical world and the real.
"We have historical time and we have mystical time," Lacote, 44,
told Reuters in an interview after his film, the first from
Ivory Coast to be shown in Cannes in 29 years, made a favorable
impression.
"If I sit here with you I believe...that my grandfather can be
near me and if I have some food, I will also put some on the
floor for the ancestors.
"Everything is connected, the world is like this."
Such connections are woven into "Run", which on the surface is
about a young man named Run who has assassinated Ivory Coast's
prime minister and is a fugitive from military patrols
crisscrossing the country to find him.
That element plays out as a straight political thriller, a bit
in "The Manchurian Candidate" vein. The mysticism seeps in
because Run has had a premonition, since he was a boy, that he
would kill a marauding elephant.
When the prime minister arrives at the cathedral where Run plans
to shoot him, he does not see a man but instead sees an elephant
walking up the steps into the house of worship.
People familiar with the history of Ivory Coast will know that
the Jean-Paul II Cathedral figuring in the scene is where
General Robert Guei, who mounted a 2000 coup to become the
country's first military ruler, took refuge during a
counter-coup two years later that sparked a lengthy civil war.
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Lacote hopes his film will be seen on two levels, one with resonance
for those who know the background, another for people who want a
political thriller with a dash of the supernatural.
"You can take the story to say, 'OK, it's an urban legend.' But if
you come from Ivory Coast you have other levels and it was important
for me to shoot in this cathedral because there were some political
events in this cathedral," he said.
He also hopes the Cannes screening of "Run", attended by Ivory
Coast's culture minister and followed closely at home in the West
African country, will mark a rebirth of the country's film industry,
which went into the doldrums during the civil war, and of African
film in general.
But he does not want to get into a rivalry with his fellow
French-Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, whose film,
"Timbuktu", about Islamic rebels imposing their rule on the Malian
desert city, screened in the main competition.
"The problem with the international festivals and with European and
American audiences is this 'vogue'...people in the Occident want one
king of African cinema and then, after we 'kill him', we put in a
new king.
"We are a continent three times bigger than Europe and you can have
five or six directors and different sets of eyes. So for me there is
no 'vogue', there are personalities who work to say something."
(Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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