Review: Little Senegal (2001/2011)

[Mark R. Leeper]

LITTLE SENEGAL
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: A museum docent in Goree, Senegal tells
museum visitors about how people were collected,
imprisoned, and sent to the New World, but he has
never seen the New World himself. Then a dream sends
him on a quest to the United States to help a relative
he has never meant. Through him we see the United
States and especially West Harlem through the eyes of
an outsider as we see how life is different. He forms
a relationship--shaky at first but later warm--with a
cousin who does not know he is a relative. Rating:
low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

Alloune (played by Sotigui Kouyate) is an elderly docent at a
museum of slavery in Goree, Senegal. The building, a prison
really, was once a holding pen for slaves being kidnapped and sent
to sea to be sold in other parts of the world. He begins to have
strange dreams that he must go to the United States and find a
relative, relation unknown, and to save him. Alloune believes he
has to fulfill the demands he was given by an ancestor. With
little understanding of how different the United States is from the
land he has known, he travels to South Carolina. But too much time
has passed, too many of the old family names have been changed, and
this is not where his distant cousins would be. The search takes
Alloune to New York City and the Senegalese community in the area
of West Harlem called Little Senegal.

Alloune finds a distant cousin, Ida (Sharon Hope), running a
newsstand, and he goes to work for her as a watchman and helper
without revealing his mission or even that she is a relative. At
first Alloune cannot please Ida. She wants nothing to do with
anything in the past. She does not even like Africans. But
Alloune realizes she is a woman of the New World with her eyes on
the present and the future. Alloune lives more in the past. With
patience Alloune forms a bond with his cousin. Eventually the two
become warm friends, as he is able to see how family relationships
are different in the United States than back in his home country.
Meanwhile Ida's young granddaughter shows up at the newsstand one
day, at least seven months pregnant and unwilling to name the
father. Alloune realizes he must bring harmony to a family that
does not want any part of their African heritage.

Kouyate seems a little mystified by the whole experience of dealing
with reality out of Senegal. His performance is a little flat, but
he is more than made up for by the human thunderstorm that is Ida.

LITTLE SENEGAL is an Algerian-French-German co-production shot on
location on what appears to be a very modest budget. It received a
release in France in 2001, but beyond film festival showings it was
not available the United States until August 30, 2011. Cinema
Libre has released it on DVD. Director Rachid Bouchareb had
already been nominated once for an Academy Award for his 1995 film
POUSSIERES DE VIE when he made LITTLE SENEGAL. In the interim he
was nominated again for his OUTSIDE THE LAW (2010). Bouchareb
coauthored the screenplay with Olivier Lorelle. He is concerned
with ethnic tensions of white and black, but the tensions he is
dealing with are from three hundred years ago. More engagingly, he
deals with tensions and distrust between African-Americans and
African-Africans.

I rate LITTLE SENEGAL a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

Film Credits: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268424/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/little_senegal/>


Mark R. Leeper
mle...@optonline.net
Copyright 2011 Mark R. Leeper