A few things are coming together. Walking and navigating traffic is really hard work, as you are constantly dodging cars and bikes from all angles. The bikes are like an incessant oncoming sea of locusts, they swarm around you and you sort of swim through them. It very suddenly dawned on me that no one uses indicators at all, ever, even once. Cars whizz along then suddenly turn. Once you see it then you wonder why you didnt see it before, its so obvious. Its crazy town all the time.
Tuesday was another nice start over breakfast. The delightful german couple is giving everyone disapproving looks. I dont know why, its not as though we invaded Poland. The coffee is great.
I was a bit tired all day, I think the bus trip and lack of sleep caught up with me. And I probably need to drink more water. I have never lived in a muslim city before, or spent much time in one. It is a very different feel. I know that North Africa is a hybrid of African and Arab cultures, and I think it starts somewhere Burkina Faso.
The fimm estival is huge. There are thousands of visitors from all over the world. They dont seem to walk around much, whereas I attract attention usually. It seems most visitors congregate around a few huge western hotels and dont venture out much, except for Fespaco films and functions. I went to the Hotel Independence for a visit, and found hundreds of visitors around a huge luxury pool sipping wine. The Independence is one of those over the top hotels that could be anywhere in the world, and its 230 rooms were fully booked.
The Who’s Who of the cinematic world was there. By Who’s Who, I mean, I didnt know who was who, but they all looked like a Who’s Who. A lot of French, American and European director types, and another big contingent of young film makers to be who often carried Sony video cameras with them, filming everything in sight. It was a very loud and energetic crowd, but good fun too. Some cool african rasta guys wandered around, and for some reason whatever they had to say was particularly fascinating for western women film makers between the ages of 22 and 30. They seemed to hang on every word and laughed out loud a lot.
It was very hard to get a programme of films! There wasnt a catalogue you could just take. I ended up at the Fespaco office, in an administration room, while someone photocopied a dozen pages for me. They are displayed on walls of cinemas, but not distributed as programmes. That seemed odd.
Home again for a rest, i’ll start the films tomorrow. With the film festival just a km away, I dozed off watching Canal+ satellite TV under a ceiling fan.