The film I’ve chosen is Crossing Voices, made as a collaboration between 2 filmmakers Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré. The co-director, Bouba Touré whose archives make up the bulk of the film, passed away 3 years ago, just before the film’s completion, and I’d been lucky enough to conduct one of his final public-facing events in October 2021. I’d originally been drawn to his work as he’s from the same ethnic group as my father, and like my dad he’d been an undocumented migrant in France, so since his passing I’ve been really keen to continue sharing his life story and his archives for reasons which I hope you will understand after watching the film. 

Put very simply, the film is about a group of West African migrants’ rights activists–including Bouba–active in Paris from the 70s, who start out organising for better housing and labour conditions.  In direct response to a drought that took place in the Sahel in 1973 they retrain as permaculturists to form a collective called Soumankidi Coura. The drought was so severe that it caused 100,000 deaths and led to the creation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development by the UN. Soumankidi Coura was created to remediate affected land in Mali–as many of the members were from there or a neighboring country–and reverse the social and economic devastation caused by desertification. 

Bouba came to France in 1965 to work in a car factory, but he picked up photography after the unrest of May ‘68 which saw the proliferation of radical and free arts education, and began working part-time as a projectionist. He used these skills to become an assiduous documentarian and archivist, capturing all of the projects and protests he was part of and collecting related posters, pamphlets and ephemera, accumulating 5 decades worth of archives. The archives he gathered would go on to form the basis of this film, co-directed with his longtime collaborator and adopted son of sorts Raphaël Grisey. When Bouba was born in 1948, 12 years before Malian independence, it was illegal for any French colonial subject in Sub-Saharan Africa to use a camera and produce film; the French were clearly wary of film’s potential to act as a manifesto against hegemonic structures, and this is exactly what Bouba has done with Crossing Voices.

The film spans centuries and continents, loosely anchored between France and its former colonies in what was known as French West Africa; 8 countries spanning the coast and interior of West Africa from Senegal to Benin, with the bulk of footage and narrative taking place in the postcolonial period, which in some ways mirrors the UK’s relationship with former colonies, but in others is distinct or deviates so I wanted to signpost some key moments in French history and policy that help British viewers better understand this film.

While Bouba’s own lifetime and lived experience roughly guide the narrative, a throughline in the film is a reverence for and reference to ancestors and previous generations, so early on the idea of a tirailleur. The ‘Senegalese tirailleurs’ were soldiers from Senegal and other French West African possessions who fought for France in WWII and played a key role in liberating areas of Europe under Nazi occupation, a feat which was also used as a bargaining chip for advocating for independence. For a better understanding of this phenomenon I’d recommend Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye on the psychological and material traumas experienced by West African soldiers returning from battle in Europe, or Indigènes by Rachid Bouchareb which deals with the experience of North African soldiers who fought for France.

Most of the film focuses on the period following decolonisation, when much like the UK, France invited migrant workers over due to labour shortages and the need to rebuild and revive industries following the war period. Their incredibly poor treatment and the shift towards increasingly xenophobic laws from the 70s onwards were issues all of the members of Soumankidi Coura were very actively involved in organising against, both prior to and during the existence of the farming collective. Unlike the UK where migrants arriving in the postwar period from former colonies were primarily housed through the private market–detailed in Sam Selvon’s The Housing Lark for example–generally speaking this was not the case in France. So-called guest workers were housed for the most part via a specially-created state housing agency SONACOTRA (which is also the subject of the song that plays during the film’s credits) that when first formed was called the National Society of Construction of Accommodation for Algerian Workers. The ‘Algerian’ was later dropped, but the appellation indicates how demographically specific this branch of social services was. Migrant workers were primarily housed in foyers which were essentially hostels with notoriously poor conditions and overcrowding, very often run and managed by former colonial administrators and military personnel which of course added to a particularly antagonistic and hierarchical dynamic. However, it is in these spaces where many of the founding members of the Soumankidi Coura collective would meet, form networks and organise, where the images of men in bunkbeds, communal courtyards, and union meetings which punctuate the film, were taken. This link between space and citizenship–the limited space that migrants are restricted and funnelled into, and then the spaces that they occupy are acutely recurrent throughout the film, and some of these occupations require further contextualisation.

In general, they were spearheaded by the sans-papiers movement; in response to the post-war economic boom dwindling in the 70s, citizenship became increasingly unattainable meaning that migrants from the global south were living in an atmosphere of constant fear and concealment trying to avoid detection, being stopped by the police and immigration raids. The sans-papiers movement emerged from this, becoming most prominent in the 90s, and was formed by a group of undocumented migrants who decided to emerge from the shadows as they were done hiding and wanted to visibilise their claims for humane treatment and take them to the streets; Crossing Voices depicts some of their key struggles in the public sphere.

In the film through Bouba’s archives we see the occupation of Église Saint-Bernard in 1996. In the spring of 1996, approximately 300 undocumented migrants—primarily from Mali and Senegal—began a series of peaceful occupations in Paris to demand legal residency. In June 1996, they moved into Église Saint-Bernard with some of the members going on hunger strike. After two months of occupation, 500 police forcibly entered the church (intended as a place of sanctuary with full backing from the clergy) using battering rams and axes. They arrested 210 undocumented migrants who were taken to a detention center on the outskirts of Paris. This lengthy occupation and the way in which it came to an end gave the sans-papiers movement unprecedented media visibility bringing it into public debate, and indirectly leading to the regularisation of around 80,000 undocumented migrants implemented by the subsequent government, making it a watershed moment, hence its inclusion in film.

The second major sans-papiers occupation depicted is a scene in which it’s snowing on the site of the Museum of the National History of Immigration which was occupied by thousands of sans-papiers between 2010-11 again demanding regularisation. What is’nt explained in this scene is the fact that the museum is on the former site of the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris which took place in 1931 and included recreations of different French colonies and human zoos, with the ideologies backing this exhibition remaining very much visible on the facade and interior decoration of the museum in its current form to this day. Some of the archival footage in this sequence can appear particularly confusing as it shows building typologies local to Mali being snowed upon, but it’s actually a replica Malian village in the Parisian colonial fair, the same site men are occupying in Bouba’s winter 2010 footage, typifying the ancestral dialogue and focus on interconnectedness that is employed throughout the film.

Other than these key moments in French politics as they relate to former colonies, it’s also important to point out some of the films and media that make up Crossing Voices. It’s told in quite a unique montage style with both archival and analogue film as well as more recent digital and GIS technology. It’s made up of several short films which Raphaël and Bouba made together earlier, but also contains films by other filmmakers, namely Sydney Sokhona and Med Hondo, two extremely important radical Mauritanian filmmakers. There is Sokhona’s 1978 film Safrana, which is a reenactment of the formation of Soumankidi Coura, and there is also My Neighbours from 1971 by Med Hondo who appears in an interview early on in the film. Interwoven throughout is also a play TRAANA that Bouba wrote in 1977, which is incredibly prescient as it details how enforced monoculture intended for export led to mass emmigration in the region, a dynamic which has only intensified in subsequent decades. The play was performed and filmed in 2018 by experimental Senegalese theatre troupe Kaddu Yaraax, and this footage is another one of the many many threads which make up the film.

Lastly, a note on why I chose to show Crossing Voices, in relation to my aspirations for cinema and how we engage with the medium. I have always been interested in cinema that deals with topics like climate change and colonialism, but often find films dealing with them to be quite demoralising and am also concerned with how passive an activity watching films can be. When I think about our wider relationship with screen culture, it’s one for me that is increasingly marked by passivity and a sense of helplessness. Therefore, I’m really drawn to films that are about these difficult topics, but are also about agency. While I think states and multinational corporations should bare the bulk of responsibility for addressing the climate crisis, for me this film really exemplifies what we can do on a communal level to very effectively organise against both xenophobic policy and ecological devastation, so it’s really this sense of agency–in this film embodied by undocumented African migrants, a demographic who are often portrayed as powerless or purposely disenfranchised–that I wanted to share audiences in terms of the off-screen possibilities that we’re able to generate.