Nascent
Film Session(s)
Venue(s)
7 minutes, United States, 2015
Bintou, a Muslim girl, and Gaus, a Christian boy, are on opposing sides of the sectarian civil war in Central African Republic. With escalating personal, tit-for-tat revenge violence, people are often targeted along religious lines.
Nascent explores how social identities are constructed and deconstructed through a surrealist dance between Bintou and Gaus’s worlds.
Until last year, the Central African Republic had no history of religious conflict. Today, their identity-based civil war has divided a once peaceful nation. Muslims fled the country in the tens of thousands, others are in hiding. The capital, Bangui, is like a place where the future has ducked into the shade to rest.
Nascent o?pens in a dream-like world while Gaus explains how he hides from the rebels under a sheet so they don’t know he is there. The film continues by setting the stakes of the civil war between both sides of the conflict, Christians and Muslims, and introduces Bintou, an eight year old Muslim girl. In the next scene, Bintou explains how her brother was killed when the rebels attacked, and how she lost everything. The next scene shows Gaus hiding from the rebels again, this time underneath a table in his living room. The film transitions from juxtaposing Bintou and Gaus’s worlds and reflections of themselves to how they see the other, and begins to visually weave the children together. The film builds to an end with Bintou and Gaus in the same room, confronting each other with questions of if and how the war could ever end.
Nascent is told entirely through Bintou and Gaus’s interviews, utilizing verite scenes and surrealistic visual lyricism, weaving their perspectives together through intimate visual poetry.
Director(s): Lindsay Branham, Jonathan Kasbe
Producer(s): -