Koundi et le jeudi national

Koundi, a large town of 1,200 inhabitants in eastern Cameroon, gets most of its income from working the equatorial forest. To prepare for an eventual end to their community forest contract with the State, the municipal authorities have set up a “national Thursday”: a monthly day of communal work from the men to create a cocoa plantation. Divided into weekdays from Sunday to Saturday, Koundi and the National Thursday has the taste of a village chronicle. But the filmmaker’s viewpoint never settles for folklore when politics rises to the surface. This perhaps utopian perspective of future self-management functions, in this magnificently photographed film, like a prism through which to observe community life, from lesson-time (“abstinence, fidelity, condom!”) to washing the clothes, from the wine-maker (who refuses to sell to drunkards) to the healer, from payday (a wad of notes with a beer) to the trial for adultery, and cruising at the “Jet Set”, the local bar. Is it really a coincidence that national Thursday is reserved for men, while the women cook for those working with the machete? As the “week” progresses (a week that one feels has been enriched by several weeks of shooting), Koundi becomes a precise and comic treaty for gender relations.

Charlotte Garson