This Spring 2018, Mdou Moctar is back on Tour across the USA. You can check out full dates here. It’s a long tour with around 30 shows. We’ll be back in the studio working on a new album. And if all goes well, they’ll be a new film at the end.
On our last tour, Mdou and I talked about shooting a film, a sequel of sorts to our Purple Rain Redux Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai. But the 2017 tour proved simply too much (I was tour managing, driving, and shooting). We managed a fair amount of footage, which was edited together for the tour trailer above.
We’ve got a much better plan this time around. The film is not far from reality. Mdou calls it “both a fiction and a documentary,” of a band traveling abroad for the first time, recounting the experience to the village. The framing device recalls “Petit á Petit,” and although we did screen this film in Agadez in 2013, any similarity speaks to the overall absence of films in this genre. The stranger abroad narrative is dominated by “Westerner in X,” wherein X is any “exotic” local: the tourist video, documentary, and arguably the foundation of anthropology. (I would be remiss here to mention the amazing “Darkest Austria”, an Austrian mockumentary playing with this trope.)
The lack of narrative inversion (or really the need to invoke “inversion”) is arguably due to transnational movement, media creation and popular distribution networks. “Tuareg Facebook” is innuadated with DIY media that provides commentary on Western social phenomena. But this analysis is relegated to imagined realities, commentary on perceptions without movement. Travel with the intention of discovery and creation is privilege. Touring musicians are in a perculiar position: artists and storytellers, they are presented with opportunities to travel as cultural ambassadors, literally presented on stage to be seen.
While this project began through field recordings and attempts to minimize my role as documentarian, I’ve recognized this as a futile pursuit (and ethically troubling, reducing documentarian to voyeur, microphones as hidden recording devices, cinema as security camera). This is a deep well and explored (in the West at least) in the annals of visual anthropology. But as the project remains focused on music, it is becoming increasingly impossible to conceptualize Tuareg guitar without addressing the Western infastructure of record labels, managers, and touring.
When I first traveled to Niger in 2012, Mdou served as a cultural translator, helping me navigate the terrain. In 2014 I returned the favor when we embarked on our first European tour. It is this exchange that we want to address through this process. We’ll be shooting on iPhones with gimbals, an exercise in technological democratization. We are writing the script via a back and forth of vocal messages over WhatsApp. We’re also looking at ways of crowd sourcing footage from concerts, inviting participants to tag videos on Instagram (#mdoufilm), invoking a contrast between ways of seeing and being seen.
As all of this collaborative work, the film is an experiment, but we invite you all to participate. Hope to see you out there!
I can see that this film starts in Stockholm and then the band go to Denmark. Where in Sweden are the concert scenes from?
First ever concert for the band outside of Niger was in Sweden, at Gagnef in 2014!
Ok, fascinating, in such a small place like Gagnef!
Dying to See Mdou perform in (or anywhere near) Texas!