He is one of the few directors in Mauritius. Notably, the acclaimed filmmaker and documentary filmmaker David Constantin received a special mention for his feature film from the jury of the last Fespaco, the Ouagadougou film festival look at the stars Since then he has made a career of performing at festivals around the world. David Constantin, author of a work grounded in the often unseen social realities of Mauritius, looks back on his journey.
RFI: Hello David Constantin, you are a director of both feature films and documentaries. How does this intellectual journey between fiction and documentation go? ?
David Constantine : I always waver between the two. I started with documentaries and then moved on to fiction because at some point I felt that fiction could get me even closer to reality than a documentary could. . I could afford certain things that I couldn’t afford in documentary. The fictions I make are very inspired by reality. If I had to approach one movement, I would say that it’s the films of Ken Loach (multi-award-winning British director, editor’s note), those kinds of films that speak to and touch me the most. My cinema is really a kind of cinema inspired by reality.
And documentary-wise, you tend to be someone who constructs his scenarios very heavily ?
There I’m exploring something I didn’t really know, which is shooting alone. It offers a freedom that is not equal. As soon as we bring in an audio engineer or someone else, we bring a different story to the project and it’s not the same anymore. The relationship you develop with your subject and the person in front of you is really very different. That’s a bit of the meaning of what I’m trying to do today.
Her themes are always deeply rooted in the social realities of Mauritius. It is important that you are a witness to the news and people’s daily experiences. ?
For me, Maurice, it’s a bit like a laboratory of what’s happening everywhere else in Africa and probably even beyond. It is an island based on an ultra-liberal model. We are often inclined to say that African countries or Indian Ocean countries lag a little behind the great movements and suffer the effects a few years after what is happening elsewhere. Personally, I mostly feel that we have a big head start on what’s happening elsewhere. On the contrary, since the arrival of the Dutch in the 16th or 17th century, liberalism has been established in Mauritius. The purpose of this island is to be a trading platform for exchange where people come, take what they can take locally, get rich and leave with the wealth created. And when we understood that, we understood what Mauritius is today, what place money has in Mauritius today, what place power has. Mauritius is a country where we have the sweetness of life, that feeling that we know and everyone talks about: the sweetness of life, the stable country, etc. But as soon as there is a little tension, you quickly feel that it can change. However, there is an underlying violence in Mauritian society that is very little visible but is often present in family circles, that is there and that exists.
They also have the distinction of producing themselves and ultimately being one of the few directors and producers in Mauritius, if not the only one. Is it difficult today to support the entire film chain on your own?
It’s complicated, yes, it’s difficult. I, the production, got there by accident rather than desire. Because when I came back to Mauritius and wanted to make films, there was no production company and I needed one to make my films. Ultimately I thought: ” Well, as long as you do that, you might as well make my own “. If you go to a festival, be it Fespaco (in Burkina Faso) or Carthage (in Tunisia), etc., there are many very beautiful films that come from the African continent. But most of them we will never see because they don’t have a screen because they don’t have screen space in Europe.What I can see is that between the first and the second film I’ve done things are being done to ensure the visibility of African films.So there is there is still a lot to do, but progress is being made.
