Director’s declaration of Bernard Giraudeau on the film, Les caprices d’un fleuve
I wished to make it a love story shattered by historical events, an adventure movie in the desert, in the heart of the jungle, along the Senegal River and on the African coast.
The ship-builders from Nantes and La Rochelle built vessels to trade in morphia, gum, Galam gold and above all in Bambara, Toucouleure or Saracolet blacks.
The endemic wars between the Negro kings provided slaves for the ships leaving for the West Indies. The ships’ crews took on men, women and children, killing all resisters. The silence of the Century of Enlightenment was deafening.
But the film talks less of slavery than of tolerance and above all of the acceptance of difference. It’s the rite of passage of a deeply European man, a noble, elitist Frenchman, blinded by the luxury and comfort of his condition, who becomes aware of the continent around him.
Some types of ignorance are as damnable as silence.
France moves inexorably towards revolution. Her people awake. But France is far away. In his palace of sand, the hero of this story will not experience the turmoil of revolution. His fate lies elsewhere. There is another journey to be accomplished, unexpected love to experience, music to listen to, a culture to be explored. The new man will be born.
How does he discover the black race? But, more important than anything else, who is Amélie Maimouna Ba, the Peul slave? In the face of doubts and contradictions, he discovers sensuality and racial blending.
He will live his African experience as very few white people lived it at the time.
Heartbreak and doubt will mark out the river of his African life. The master and the slave. Father and daughter. Man and wife.
In the days of the French Revolution, in a virgin land that the white man has already crushed, the hero of this story attempts to "Praise Difference" in the way that Albert Jacquard would two centuries later."