Mutsoóngo Malaávu (2024)

Overview

The film’s idea was inspired by Amos Tutuola’s book, The palm wine drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. While this author describes the adventures of a character to find his palm wine tapster, I chose to show – in an experimental and sensorial way – who this very important person from the villages of West Africa is. The film is the result of an ethnographic research about the relationship of the Yoómbe with the oil palm in the Mayombe Forest, Democratic Republic of Congo. My main interlocutor, Defao, whom I accompanied daily during fieldwork, was a palm wine tapster.