Small Country: Great Emotion (Review)
A sensitive film and a beautiful adaptation of the successful novel by Gaël Faye.
After bringing to the screen The promise of dawn by Romain Gary, Eric Barbier confronts another childhood, that told by Gaël Faye in Little country. The action of the novel begins in 1992, at the heart of the games of a ten-year-old boy, Gabriel, raised in Burundi between a French father and a Rwandan mother. The director transcribes through pretty scenes the flavors of a lost paradise and manages to translate Gaël Faye’s fine writing on daily life in Bujumbura into authentic moments of History where banality is dotted. But this joyful ode to childhood will gradually turn into a nightmare. And it is at the height of a child, almost removed from the misfortune that we experience, like Gabriel the hero, the Rwandan genocide, when, accompanied by his younger sister, he begins to hear the onslaught of the murderous madness on the march. Jean-Paul Rouve embodies their father. And he excels in an ambivalent register where he gives colors to a rather silent character. The success of Little country owes a lot to his energy. Facing him, Isabelle Kabano interprets, with a rare sensitivity, a mother completely cracked from the inside. Caught in a vice between forced exile and life with her children, she will be consumed before our eyes before the impossible choice. Brief, Little country it’s a slap in the face to Hollywood films about African wars that have gorged themselves on images of violence. Here, The Slap is even greater, when the viewer, like the hero, realizes the magnitude of the horror.
Small Country, in theaters August 28, 2020
