KARMEN GEÏ

KARMEN GEÏ, 2001
Senegal, France | DVD, Color, 86’ | French
Director: Joseph Gaï Ramaka
Cast: Djeïnaba Diop Gaï, Magaye Niang, Stephanie Biddle

“Love is a rebellious bird, nobody can harness her”: Similar to Bizet’s Carmen, Senegalese Karmen as well voices these words in a song while falling in love, she gets involved in shady businesses, she leaves her lover in order to live her freedom and she sacrifices everything to this end. African Karmen leads a more independent, tempestuous and heedless life than her French counterpart. In this adaptation, Gaï Ramaka creates a heroine with a plot familiar from the favorite operatic piece, though in a completely different vein. This feast of music and dance on the background of Dakar’s ocean views does not use Bizet’s most popular arias, melodies penetrated into our daily life. The film’s soundtrack is composed of carefully selected examples from Senegal’s different kinds of music. A work hard to describe with words, cross bred at origins, but with an imagery borrowed from the African sun, with colors from African patterns.