Jennifer Bajorek, review of KANE, Hamedine. — La maison bleue. Film documentaire, 55 min., Belgique, Tândor Productions, 2020, DCP/Bluray/DVD. In Cahiers d’études africaines, No. 254 (special issue on “Les équivoques de la dissuasion de la migration” [The Ambiguities of Migration Deterrence], ed. Camille Cassarini, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye and Kelly Poulet) (2024): 470-475.
“Hamedine Kane’s remarkable 2020 film, La maison bleue (The Blue House) (Tândor Production, Belgium), centers on the artist Alpha Diagne and various goings-on around his house. Alpha’s house, indeed blue and located in the so-called Jungle of Calais—being shot, there, on the eve of the camp’s “definitive” destruction in 2016—is the film’s ostensible subject. Soon enough, however, the viewer comes to understand that Alpha’s house is itself a kind of camera: a shadowy and enigmatic chamber that is a privileged site for the production of images. This depiction, which is brilliantly set up by Kane in the film’s opening sequence, is of paramount significance to our interpretation of the film as a whole.”