Alain Kassanda

Fred, unemployed graduate like many young Nigerians, is starting a new job as a taxi driver. As for Akin, he taxes commercial vehicles for the national transport union. They both operate in the rich urban landscape of Ibadan, in which Alain Kassanda’s camera choreographs the multiplicity and perpetual power relations at play.

Every Thursday, a group of students from the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria, organizes a film club, transforming a small amphitheater into a political agora where they refine their vision and develop a critical voice. "Coconut Head Generation", a scornful expression to designate a stubborn and brainless youth, takes on a whole new meaning when the students turn this stigma around to claim their freedom of thought.

This debut film by Alain Kassanda starts off as a process of self-examination: How well does he really know his grandparents? How true are his ideas about his birth country DR Congo, whose national identity was partly molded by the Belgian colonizers? And, by extension, how much does he know about himself? In Colette et Justin, Kassanda travels through time and his own past, in the process bringing postcolonial Congo to evocative life.