Was I destined to become a filmmaker? Well, let’s see… If I look into my personal history, I don’t see much. Very early on I was spotted as being very smart, even before I went to school. But intelligent people don’t make good filmmakers. Godard is an example. He was more of a philosopher than a filmmaker. If I look at another thing that could have helped me to become a filmmaker, I think there is my father, although he was a police commissioner, he liked music a lot, he also liked the devices, the first Betamax VCRs, he brought them home with the old French films where they didn’t kill enough compared to the American films. I was fascinated by these devices that the technicians came to repair and for the first time I thought I could become an engineer. Then there was music, I was the family DJ, he entrusted me with the animation of the family parties and the village parties. They say that I was quite good, I was able to make people dance until the morning. One evening in 1976, he brought back Fela’s vinyl album « Shakara ». After a few days, we all sang it in a language we didn’t understand but which we felt gave us pride in being African. What was unique was that a song lasted 25 minutes, where all the albums had side A and side B. Then he went on a tour of Cameroon with his new wife, he took me with him. This trip made me love my country and travel. I think my father gave me two things that were decisive to make cinema, humor, he was a joker who liked to make fun and tell funny stories. In addition he gave me the love of people, I think we were between 20 and 30 people at home, between the cousins of the village, nephews, uncles and aunts added to my 7 brothers and sisters. Even though we lived in the city of Yaoundé, I was able to experience an African community life in this house. In addition, the three-month vacation in the village with my grandmother, her mother, was a moment we looked forward to. A total immersion in the life of the village with titanic works that gave me the taste for manual work and especially the courage to undertake titanic works. I remember when my grandmother decided that we, her grandchildren, would build her new house. Imagine for us who were barely 8 years old, only the quantity of water to draw. When she gave us peanuts to shell, it was in bags!  We used to make fun of her because she was the kind of person who gives good news and cries, and bad news and cries. On the other hand, my father’s little sister was the opposite, nothing was serious for her. Everything had to be played down. His slogan, « leave the children alone! » As soon as you set foot in her house, she would start celebrating. She knew how to express the joy and happiness of being alive. She gave me a taste for celebration. I don’t know if this whole childhood is what produced the type of filmmaker I have become. It was my father, despite the fact that we were on the outs, who made me take the entrance exam for the new television station, Cameroon Television, which I was to join as an editor after a formidable section out of a thousand candidates, only twenty were selected after several stages of selection. I was very comfortable with the competition, I like this aspect in the cinema even if I understood with practice that the very good ones have difficulty with the juries who always decide on the basis of a consensus and thus of an average. But next to my father to whom I became attached at the age of two, I am told that I cried so much when he had to travel to Douala that I had to be put on the plane to go and meet him. Of course next to my father was my mother, she told me that she didn’t think I would survive because I was so fragile. And because she had two traits that I am defined by today, she was ultimately my role model. My mother was both a fighter and a visionary. I have to say that I was her arm when it came to resistance actions against the second woman my father had decided to bring into the house. I have to admit that our complicity beat her in the struggle. The day after this marriage in which my mother participated with a lot of dignity, I caught my mother crying and I understood afterwards that she had been trapped by her visionary side. This second woman came to put an end to a life of happiness that we were leading and everything turned upside down. I have the image of a beautiful villa in which we lived with two Mercedes parked but where life was sad. I think it was from this experience that I knew that money was not happiness and led me to not make its pursuit a life project. I also saw early on the cowardice and corruption of people, people who would not say hello to my mother because my father preferred someone else. I was also lucky enough to have two very different brothers, the one who came before me who taught me that diplomacy was a real quality and knew how to navigate in troubled waters and above all took an exceptional quality from my father, that of taking care of the people around him. My brother never forgets anyone and always works for the people around him to flourish. The brother who came after me was the one who made me understand art and artists. He started making things before he could even speak. When one of his pieces broke, he would get sick and heal as he put it back together. Because we grew up together, even though we were going to be very different personalities later on, we understood each other very well. And my biggest support has always been that family. I remember my last little brother coming to me and saying that since you have decided to go into film, I hope it won’t be like the African films we see here. He was the one who would watch the movies first that my father would bring in. When asked if the movie was good, he would say, « No, it’s a French movie, you only kill once. »  I remember for this film Le Clan des Siciliens, he said « we don’t kill much but it’s a good film ». That’s how we judged the films. Then it was the sound of the gunshot, in French films, which had nothing to do with the sound of American films. We lived in a small town in the north of Cameroon where there were two movie theaters, one specialized in Italian B movies including spaghetti westerns, the other in Indian movies but both showed Chinese movies. I must confess that I watched a movie like Bruce Lee’s Big Boss almost 40 times!

What makes one the filmmaker that one becomes? It’s hard to say. But I do know that my encounter with the Sony BVE 800 editing machine was a defining moment, that machine had buttons that lit up like a space station. I forgot to tell you that I was studying physics at the University of Yaoundé, I was even fascinated by quantum physics but I also knew that a country like Cameroon would never make the atomic bomb. This machine allowed me to live several fantasies at the same time. The one of the technology of the future and the one of the music. Indeed the guy who presents us the machine has as video test, a video clip that he is editing. Here I am, finding the music, combined this time with this editing machine. What I don’t know and I’m going to ask our trainer whom I’m going to call aside. « Is this a good thing? He’ll confirm, « It’s a good thing. » The trick is the editing. I’m going to throw myself into it by spending all my nights in front of the SONY BVE 800 trying to do some editing. And it is in front of this machine that the rest of my life will be built. First the greatest director of television will ask me to be an editor, even though I don’t know anything yet, then the greatest journalist will ask me for his first show and finally an editor coming from France will give me the information to go to a contest to train in France. Four things are going to define what I am going to become, my friends from Cameroon with whom I am going to live, what could be better than to enter a country like France in such good company! Then an American director who came to train us in Cameroon and who offered me his room in Bastille filled with film books on weekends and during the vacations, he introduced me to independent cinema in Parisian cinemas and then an old South African painter who arrived in France in 1946 and who was going to tell me about his French experience as a black artist. And finally, the courses of semiology that fascinated me to the point of going to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, the last seminar of the one who invented the semiology of cinema, Christian Metz. 

Is that what made me the filmmaker I am today? It is obvious that you don’t become such a filmmaker by going to a school, if it is not life that decides to take you in charge and bring you to your destiny. Except that even if it is a mission that is entrusted to you, it is important to look back, to draw the key elements in order to be able to reproduce through education what has been determining by operating a form of modeling. If this story is what I had to become the filmmaker I have become, how do I propose a posture and a practice as a filmmaker, as an intellectual and as an artist?