LA VACHE MERVEILLEUSE

A realistic tale set in Niger about the marvellous white cows, from India, that belong to the Songhay water spirit Harakoy Dikko. After Madame l’eau and Moi fatigué debout, moi couché, the DALAROUTAMOU group, Jean Rouch and his “friends of all time” resume shooting La vache merveilleuse: “a collaborative production” based on an idea by Lam Ibrahim Dia, who died after the first shoot in 1994, and whose permission is sought to continue with the second shoot. The two unfinished films of this realistic tale are totally embedded in Rouch’s other projects of that period, forming a filmic whole where all the fragments permeate each other. The shoot shows constant giving/counter-giving — also visible in Mosso Mosso – Jean Rouch comme si — a potlatch running through many of his “ethnofictions”, notably those made around the first two shoots of La Vache merveilleuse (a third shoot was made in 2001 and inserted into the group’s last ethnofiction, Le Rêve plus fort que la mort.