Watching: Fanado

Overview

This film documents the festivities and different stages of an initiation ritual of a Balanta community in Guinea Bissau. The filmmaker Sana na N'Hada, belonging to that same community, at the time of the film production was himself not initiated. Many years later Sana na N'Hada finally experiences the process through Fanado, what produced the acknowledgement of a personal conflict with his own film: the modernist ethnological look casted upon the events, articulated with his comments in the French language contrasts with the ungraspable, implicated in the opacity of those practices.