A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but, since it was included in the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ list, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, it turned out to be one of the most bewildering documentaries I have ever seen. I have to admit that I didn’t know anything about this movie or its topic before watching it and, at first, I was wondering if it might be all fake. Obviously, it wasn’t and I can imagine how shocking it must have been for the audience who first saw it back in the 50’s. Of course, as a Westerner, our first reaction would be to reject the whole thing as some kind of hysterical nonsense during which they even killed a dog, drunk his blood and ate the poor animal. However, most religious rituals are actually fairly ridiculous, even Christian rituals. Indeed, eating the sacramental bread as if it was the body of Christ and drinking wine as if it was his blood is also pretty weird when you think about it. Furthermore, in the Old Testament, it was fairly common to sacrifice animals to atone for your misdeeds. While watching this movie, I was thinking that, in any religion, whatever if it was the Hauka or some more established religion, the rituals pretty much boil down to a group of grown-ups playing dress-up. Of course, from the outside, it might all seem either ridiculous or hysterical but, on the other sense, how are we supposed to make any sense from this life we were given (completely randomly if you don’t believe in God)? The whole point of any ritual ceremony, and it includes the Hauka, is to have this moment you share with your community and, intrinsically, it is actually not a bad thing, in the contrary. In this specific case, it was dealing with some immigrants coming from small villages mostly from Niger, suddenly living in a big chaotic city like Accra who had to cope somehow with this new life with some dead-end jobs with very little future prospects. However, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that the explanation might be even more complex than that after all. In spite of what was said in this documentary, there was already a ‘possession cult’ tradition in Niger and this Hauka movement originated from that so it seemed it might be linked to something quite profound for this folk and completely alien to us Westerners. Still, there was something so strange about all these men supposedly in trance mimicking British colonial occupiers performing the same elaborate military ceremonies. I wish it would have been longer and that they gave us more background on this Hauka thing and on these men involved in this movement but the damned thing was so unsettling but also quite fascinating to behold, that’s for sure.

7/10