A film by Lavinia Currier Based on the memoir by Louis ... - FDb.cz

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
For generations, storytellers and artists from around the world have found inspiration from the
landscape and people of the African continent. Told from a “modern” and “Western” perspective, novels
such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, or Stanley Livingston’s The Dark
Continent, often represent a journey to Africa as a temporary state of a descent into man’s primitive and
primal nature – part madness, part enlightenment – but have ignored the reality of life for the many peoples,
traditions, and experiences of that complex and misunderstood part of the globe.
“OKA!” might seem to have a familiar premise – an ethnomusicologist travels to Africa and
ultimately learns something about himself and his connection to the world through his relationship with an
ancient and (to him) exotic tribe – but this is no simple “white man’s journey” where the hero eventually
must return to his home of origin as a changed man. Rather, Larry Whitman from the outset really feels
like he belongs among the Bayaka – his trip is not a temporary descent into an unfamiliar world, but a
return home.
The <strong>film</strong> is based on the life of Louis Sarno, an ethnomusicologist who first went to live with the
Bayaka to record the sounds of the African rainforest. His initial journeys are documented in his first
memoir, Song of the Forest, published in 1993, and the CD-book Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the
Babenzl Pygmies (1996). For the next several years, Sarno worked on a second memoir, which he called
Last Thoughts Before Vanishing from the Face of the Earth. It was during this time that he first met
<strong>film</strong>maker <strong>Lavinia</strong> <strong>Currier</strong>, serving as her translator when she was doing research for a documentary on a
man called Ota Benga. (Benga was a pygmy who was brought to the United States as an “exhibit” for the
1905 World’s Fair, part of a shameful western tradition of exploiting African natives as freaks or oddities).
“While I was in Yandombe, the pygmy village, with Louis as my translator, a Bayaka asked why I was
doing that story. I explained that it was instructive for us to learn from our mistake, so that kind of racism
doesn’t happen again. But he told me that in Pygmy culture, they like to forget sad things and remember
happy things, so I started to rethink that story from another perspective.” She instead asked Sarno if he had
any ideas that would better represent the Bayaka, not as an exploited underclass, but as a vibrant and
relevant community, and he suggested she read his unpublished work.
“Louis shared real stories about the life of the Bayaka, like the couple who lived deep in the forest,
who were almost feral, sleeping in trees. People would bring them supplies and the couple would come out
and greet them, but then vanish – they didn’t want to be involved in any of the village’s activities. This
became the character of Sataka, who is not quite of the village,” she says today. “All of the characters in
‘OKA!’ were based on real people that Louis had known, or composites of people. In fact, Mayor Bassoun