Standing on The Edge of the World

Sylvain L'Espérance has always been able to capture reality with a quiet strength where everything is played out in the patience of the gaze and the attentive ear. Marked by the situation of migrants during a previous trip to Africa, the filmmaker became interested in the stories of a small group of people living in Bamako, not by choice, but following the trying bifurcations of their respective life trajectories.

After having settled there, having lived there and observed the daily life of the people, it is through the encounters and the links that Espérance initiated this project, willing to make it a participative work, a kind of collective account of these people's lives from different horizons sharing the same uprooting.

With a comprehensive approach that leaves plenty of room for people to speak out - speaking out to tell their individual stories but also to create collectively (through theater, poetry, song and dance) - the filmmaker collects the reminiscences of their migratory journeys and their impressions of this place where they are tolerated but never really welcomed. But this impasse does not mean a general apathy. These migrants have an agentivity. In their resilience and lucidity of everyday life, they act, speak, create, move, play, occupy space and express themselves.

"I will live my life. I won't let it live me!" concludes one of them at the end of the film. All of the world's hope and resistance is found in these words' marked expression.

Jason Burnham
Tënk's programming coordinator