If You Are A Man premiered at the 37th DOK.fest München: Simon Panay’s debut is an arresting and enthralling portrait of a young boy living with optimism in the harshest of environments.
French director Simon Panay has been directing short documentaries in West Africa for the past ten years and continues to explore this continent for his feature doco If you are a Man which has just premiered as part of the DOK.horizonte Competition, at the 37th DokFest München running from May 4 to 15, 2022.
If you are a Man centers on a 13-year-old Burkina Faso boy named Opio who works in Perkoa gold mines, breaking rocks and dragging men and bags to the surface in order to realize his dream: he wants to go to school. Opio attended school until the age of 8 and since then he chose to leave the village and tried his luck at the closeby gold mine following his father’s second wedding and disengagement towards his first wife and the children. Opio distanced himself from his family and only returns to the village once a month. To ensure a future for Opio, his father would like him to take a vocational training course in the nearby town of Réo but unfortunately cannot afford the school fees. Opio will have to raise the money by himself and the only way to do so is to ask his boss for a promotion: the right to go down into the underground galleries that frighten him so much.
As we didn’t know much about what runs in the family, it is clear that Opio doesn’t consider his father worthy of existence. We can see him interacting with his younger siblings but he barely talked with his parents and as years go by, his work team has become his new family.
If you are a Man opens with an immersive long take where passionate Opio – with his iconic yellow shirt – walks through the mine areas, immediately portraying the great proximity between Opio’s life and his workmates. Through this approach, director Simon Panay captures the joy and danger felt by its subject. His life feels tragic, and the way the filming team portrays him creates empathy. You cannot help but wonder what his life is if he doesn’t work at the gold mines and spend his days with his family, his anger can be read on every inch of his face when he back to the village. Despite this, you can not deny how much he enjoys working at the mines, even despite very variable earnings – a bag of stones extracted from the underground paid. With each bag comes the same excitement and the same hope of wealth, always disappointed by a meager booty.
By using extraordinary camerawork, director Panay uses large focal lengths and wide shots at the mines to capture the sense of beauty and its danger and also to reflect Opio’s ease, while at home he chose to shoot at close range, framing everything as narrow as possible to mirror his anger in a place where everything is out of his control. These beautiful shots combined with a great color grading done by Olivier Garcia, creating a multi-layered feel and leaves the audience with a greater appreciation for its subject and his world. Overall, Panay’s debut is an arresting and enthralling portrait of a young boy living with optimism in the harshest of environments in pursuit of a modest dream.
If you are a Man (Si tu es un homme) is produced by France’s Loull Production and Moteur S’il Vous Plaît and in co-production with Burkina Faso’s Acacia Productions and Canal+ International while Cercamon are handling international sales.
