In the Billowing Night is a poetic discourse on colonialism. Directed by Erika Etangsalé, it evokes her unknown ancestors torn from remote regions, and sets out to exorcize the pain of displaced people like her father. While some of the images are predictable, the dream sequences in black-and-white reveal the force of unspoiled nature on a volcanic island, transporting us back in time. The documentary, which won the First Film Award at FIDMarseille, is showcasing at IDFA.
Etangsalé’s father, Jean-René, breaks years of silence to reveal his inner pain over leaving his homeland of Réunion, a small island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. At seventeen, he emigrated to France, where he trained as a plumber and settled in Mâcon. He has French citizenship, as colonies were granted French Department status in 1946, yet he still feels like a foreigner. In his colorful 8mm films, we see him as a rather carefree young man, sporting a trendy Afro hairdo and marrying a white bride. They have three children, but we don’t learn much about their mother.
Erika, one of his daughters, seems to have inherited her father’s nostalgia for her dispossessed identity and land. She discovers that she and her father share the same dreams of misty mountains and dead birds. Determined to reveal and heal the inner pain that has haunted him for years, she decides to travel back to the island with him.
While Jean-René was free to leave France, he chose to stay, and today he seems content in his retirement, walking his dog and tending to his garden and tomatoes. Nevertheless, the price he and other migrants pay is steep. After losing his Creole language and sense of belonging, the ultimate loss is the knowledge that his surname comes from a slave plantation in Réunion. His family origins are uncertain, as waves of conquerors, slaves and migrants arrived in Réunion over the course of centuries from Africa, Portugal, England, France, India, and China. Looking out over the island’s high mountain peaks, he speaks of the legends that haunt the island: the mountains are named after escaped slaves who preferred death to living in captivity.
As the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire wrote, “genocide by substitution” was a deliberate policy in the overseas colonies aimed at replacing Black administrative workers with white French émigrés. This phrase from the 1960s has now ironically become a rallying cry of white nationalists in Europe and America. Césaire also wrote about Négritude, a concept that still defines the assertion of Black identity and struggles. In the 1960s, rebellions in colonial territories led the French government to create a system of migration from the French Caribbean and Africa which paid for young migrants to travel to France, train and work there. From 1963 to 1998, some 160,000 workers were recruited through the program. But the documentary has relevance beyond Réunion and France, as news stories like the Windrush scandal in the U.K. come to light, whereby numerous recruited workers from the British Caribbean colonies face deportation today.
Etangsalé incorporates footage from Yann Le Masson’s 1963 documentary Sucre Amèr denouncing fraudulent elections and the suppression of community activists in Réunion. It was censured for almost a decade and remains a testimony to those turbulent years. Though she salutes that spirit of rebellion, the present-day reality on the island seems sober in comparison. And her father’s words seem scripted to fit her vision. “My children have built on my own dreams, like a transmission… What do our ancestors think of us today?” But the film’s last words resonate much more in the Malagasy, Xitsonga and Wolof languages, warning of the light of the living dwindling and urging us never to forget.
Director, screenplay: Erika Etangsalé
Producers: Jonathan Rubin
Cinematography: Fiona Braillon, Jonathan Rubin
Editing: Marianne Haroch
Sound: Pierre George
Production companies: Les films du haut d’un arbre, VMP Films, Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (France)
Venue: IDFA (Paradocs)
In French and Réunion Creole
51 minutes
