Dakan (Destiny) Movie Screening
We organize movie screenings to showcase excellent African indie talents in film. Our first, Dakan (Destiny), is a historical and cultural landmark in African Film. It is known to be the first West-African feature film to deal with its subject matter, the love between two men. It subverts the norms of society and presents a story of enduring black love in the face of adversity.
Manga and Sory are two young men in love with each other. Tranced by their youthful affectations, Manga tells his widowed mother of the relationship, and Sory tells his father. However, both parents forbid their sons from seeing each other again.
Sory marries a young woman and has a child and Manga’s mother turns to witchcraft to cure her son. After unsuccessfully undergoing a lengthy form of aversion therapy, Manga meets and becomes engaged to a white woman. Sory and Manga both try to make their heterosexual relationships work but are ultimately drawn back to each other.
Manga’s mother eventually gives her blessing to the pair and the end of the film sees Sory and Manga driving off together towards an uncertain future.
A 1997 French/Guinean drama film written and directed by Mohamed Camara. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival during Directors’ Fortnight and played at several other film festivals including the 1998 New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. In that same year, Dakan won the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Foreign Narrative Feature at L.A. Outfest. It also played in the 1999 Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and opened in French theatres on July 7, 1999. It was released into Region 2 DVD by Éclair on September 22, 2005. In 2006 Dakan was shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s “Another Wave: Global Queer Cinema” exhibition in New York City.
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Mohamed Camara (born 1959 in Conakry) is a Guinean film director and actor based in France. He studied at the Atelier Blanche Salant in Paris and has explored controversial topics in his films such as homosexuality in Dakan.
Writing for Variety, David Stratton called it “a trailblazer in the African context” and praised the use of traditional music highlighting that Western audiences might find the story “slight”. In The New York Times, Anita Gates praised its significance within its context and critiqued a lack of subtlety in the film.
The movie served as new material and inspiration to the audience of about 130 people. It presented an alternative expression of the universal experience of love and provided a lens to critique ideas of society and culture through the medium of film.
