Le Rite, la Folle et Moi
(Le Rite, la Folle et Moi)

This debut feature could be retitled as The Story of a Secret. At the Togolese festival, Akpéma (the girls’ rite of passage into womanhood), the filmmaker revisits a family secret. “The Madwoman” is Pitalou, her grandmother, who had left home and been banished from the family’s memory. When the time comes for Gentille Menguizani Assih to sponsor her younger sister at Akpéma, she chooses transmission rather than secrecy, even if she has to face her father in front of the camera. Blending ethnography and autobiography, she challenges the traditional gender roles and points up the hypocrisy of a rite that, while celebrating woman’s dignity, is the occasion for the chiefs to choose their young wives. As both a protagonist and observer, and against all expectations, she lends her father a psychoanalytical ear. Her calmness is rooted in conviction: she is in fact Pitalou, who has returned to “reinstate the truth”, cleanse a sexist insult that has persisted for generations. CG