Le jardin de papa

Jean and Marie, French newly weds, go on their honeymoon to Africa, where Jean lived as a little boy. On the way from the airport to the hotel, their taxi hits a child, who is injured. Bystanders blame the taxi driver and the white couple and they are threatened by an angry crowd, egged on by local gang leader Cobra. They just manage to escape and hide in the house of a young woman, Kapinga. In the frightened night that the four have to spend together, Jean turns out to be a convinced racist. Marie had been madly in love, but she loses her naïvety when she suddenly recognises his father in him, the old colonial who regarded Africa as France’s back garden. The situation gets grimmer, the house is besieged and the driver gets injured. Zeka Laplaine situated his third feature during the presidential elections in an unnamed African country (he shot it in the narrow streets of Saint Louis, Senegal; Laplaine himself grew up in Congo). The relationship between white and black has changed drastically since Jean grew up there. Laplaine brings the protagonists from the colonial past back together and confronts them in the present situation with their primary instincts that take over in an emergency -in spite of any considered reasoning. The film maker does this with pace and inventiveness.