Gam Gam

Karim, working as a baggage handler at Brest airport for ten years, returns every two years to his hometown, Ouagadougou. As usual, family and friends are eagerly waiting for him, either to partake of his relative success, or to fill him in on the happenings of their lives. Admired, feared and criticised, Karim is walking a tightrope between two worlds. Brothers or friends are all different facets of himself, of what he might have remained: a gam gam, which in Ouaga slang means a “medler, troublemaker, someone who sells everything”. Fleeting lovers who once dreamed of leaving Africa thanks to their romance with a white tourist (as did Moustache) or affaire-men dealing in cell phone chargers, they couldn’t or didn’t want to leave and regard Karim with a tinge of bitterness—“those who come back here are screwing up the country,” we hear at an all-night party. Never condescending or didactic, Natacha Samuel and Florent Klockenbring’s camera does not over-illuminate the dark areas, confronting us as soon as Karim arrives with the dynamic of the language, spaces and situations. The filmmakers’ sometimes meandering immersion, tempered by their longstanding familiarity with the people they film, helps to convey the disorientation induced by a temporary return. The repairs to Karim’s family house become a metaphor of recurrent wear and tear, and of a gap perhaps impossible to bridge. (Charlotte Garson)