VISAGES DE FEMMES - Désiré Écaré

A movie by Désiré Ecaré

14 x 19 cm / 64 pages + DVD / June 2023 

ISBN : 978-2-35137-341-5

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"What a delight, a film that puts gaiety above doctrine [...] The subject lent itself to heavy-handed demonstrations: just think, the condition of women in the city and in the country, a cakewalk for scribblers! Visages de femmes succeeds in the tour de force of disguising the theme with casual zigzags. [...]

You can imagine Renoir telling stories by Pagnol. By dint of jealousy over the platonic love affairs of his wife and brother, a husband ends up becoming the cuckold he dreaded being. As for the wife, she plays the military version of L'École des femmes, to defend herself by learning karate. This episode includes an erotic sequence of such beauty as to render all pornography obsolete: the adulterous couple make love in a river with the innocence and imperial grace of the early ages."

Michel Mardore, Le Nouvel Observateur

• DVD

Visages de femmes (restored version)

by Désiré Écaré

Ivory Coast, fiction, 105 mins, 1985

FIPRESCI prize at the 1985 Cannes Festival

starring : Eugénie Cissé-Roland, Sidiki Bakaba, Albertine N'Guessan, Kouadio Brou...

A village woman is seduced by her husband's younger brother. Fanta learns karate to cope with her husband's fits of jealousy. In Abidjan, Bernadette runs a business whose profits go to her in-laws...Three women in search of the independence that society denies them.

• BONUS: Other Écaré films!

Concerto pour un exil (restored version)

Ivory Coast / France, fiction, 30 mins, 1967

with :La Kotta, Assaf, Henri Duparc, Hervé Denis, Claudie Chazel, Sékou Camara

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A student returns to Côte d'Ivoire after graduating in Paris, hoping one day to become an ambassador. When he meets other young people who have followed the same path and had the same dreams, he loses his illusions.

À nous deux France (restored version)

Ivory Coast / France, fiction, 60 mins, 1970

Directors' Fortnight, Cannes 1970

starring: Fabienne Fabre, Pierre Garnier, Marie Gabrielle N'Guipie

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A group of Ivorian women go to Paris where the men have left to take up executive jobs, leaving them alone. They take their destiny into their own hands.

• BOOK

- Photographs by Désiré Écaré

- Photo novels based on the film

- ‘At last an African porno’, Louis Skorecki