If you are lucky enough to be attending this year’s Fantastic Fest then one film you do not want to miss is Saloum. Written and directed by Jean Luc Herbulot, Saloum is an energetic and beautiful burst of cinema that seeks to set itself apart from other films coming out of the African film industry. The story follows three mercenaries known as The Hyenas whose world gets upended after they seek refuge in an isolated holiday camp. Knowing much more than that would spoil the experience, but rest assured Herbulot has cooked up an exciting blend of action, drama, Western, and horror, having clearly taken inspiration from the movies he has grown up watching.
Ahead of the screening at Fantastic Fest, we stole a few moments with Herbulot to find out more about his journey into filmmaking and how Saloum came to life.
How did you get into making movies?
Since I was a kid I’ve always been obsessed with creating worlds. Even when I was a kid I was playing with ants and trying to do some kingdom creation with ants. I always liked to try and expand my vision of what would be a world. Then I came by writing when I was less than ten years old. Then it became video games, music, and drawing. Those have been the things that have drawn myself into creativity, and creation. I never felt about movies as being my work or my hobby because I always felt it was a rich people sport. When I arrived in France following some multimedia studies, there was a course about editing and I just fell in love. Editing is mixing everything: music, lighting, drawings, and acting, costumes, just a big creative thing. Even today it’s been almost twenty years and I keep discovering things that you can create so it just got me obsessed with what you do in movies. Slowly, slowly, I started to do short movies, after that a feature, then a second, and now I’m doing two in one year. I’m very, very, very happy as long as I can create. That’s the thing that makes me breath.
You and your producer Pamela Diop actually went to Saloum whilst you worked on the idea, how did being in the environment help shape the film?
I went to Saloum because it was the birth region of my business partner Pamela Diop. We had just created the company and she said to me, “I have to bring you to my birth region”, and I was, “oh, not another tourist thing!” Then I just fell in love the first time that I saw these big lakes and spaces and water. Every five minutes I was harassing her saying, “we have to make a movie here”. She told me to wait until I’d seen everything and I can tell you that what you see in the movie is one tenth of what you see in Saloum. This region is just as beautiful as it is scary. There are some places in Saloum where you don’t want to bathe, or you don’t want to go by night. The funny thing was, the hyenas, the characters that I created, I didn’t know that Saloum is infested with hyenas. I discovered that when I was shooting. Weirdly enough, we couldn’t get one shot with a real hyena so that never happened. But Saloum is as marvellous as it is scary, and that just inspired us. The first idea was let’s make a movie about the people in the camp, and everything goes south in the camp. After that, when I went on my side writing the script, then it became the story of the Hyenas and then it became the story of Chaka and what happened to him and all the background behind it. All the sub-themes that I wanted to get across about politics, what is a hero, what’s a hero movie today? Everything just came after, but first of all we want to talk about Saloum. We want to show how beautiful it is and how scary it can be, and how we can put that into a genre movie. We wanted the people to have fun, but in the same way to discover a part of Africa. And in the same way discover that African cinema can be a lot of things. We are very disappointed as Africans that there is no movie representing us so, “fuck it and let’s do what we want”, and that’s how it happened.
What I see from African cinema is definitely not what I think African cinema should be, or at least not just that. We fought very hard, fighting for what we have always wanted for this cinema. The first thing was, I grew up without heroes for myself. I grew up with American heroes, Chinese heroes, and recently Korean heroes, but no African one. Now that I have the power in my craft I feel like I can show some stuff. I just thought to myself, I’ll be the only one doing this if no one else is as there is something to be told about the myths, about the heroes, about the monsters, about everything that you can tell can tell about Africa, and nobody seems to be ready for it so fuck it let’s do it. It’s just doing something you want to do, and the chance that we have is that nobody else is doing that.
Sign language forms a significant portion of the communication, what prompted that storytelling device?
I love the word device, because it was a device. It was a counter device to the menace of the movie, which was don’t hear them. Of course if you don’t want to hear them the most powerful person would be somebody who has the ability to not hear anything. That’s when Awa came. I really wanted to have a successor for the Hyenas because for me, Saloum is the movie about Chaka – the hero – but also the Hyenas, and Saloum is the third act of the Hyenas. It’s the dusk of their group. It’s the end. I wanted a successor to them so Awa came at the right place for that. I wanted to explore the theme of ‘what is a hero’, because we always think of heroes as being strong and fearless, badass and charismatic, I really wanted to dig into that. That’s why the first part of the movie is all about that big Western stylisation. Oh yeah, we want to follow them, they’re so blah, blah…Then the more they enter Saloum, the more you see things, “this guy is afraid of water? Are these guys lying about something?” The more it goes on, the more you’re like, “well they’re not heroes, they are just human”. Then the revenge, what it brings is something else. After that you slowly start to bring in the other hero who is Awa with her sign language. I always felt it was very interesting for the Hyenas to also know this language because of course these guys are mercenaries, there are fifty to fifty-five countries in Africa so of course those guys have been travelling a lot. There are a lot of languages they know, and what type of idiot would they be if they cannot talk to each other in a conflict from a distance? That’s where the sign language came as it is efficient for them as soldiers, but also for the concept of the movie.
It’s a film about these male characters, the Hyenas, and yet the narration is a female voice, what was your intention with this switch up?
It’s the voice of Awa. Some people didn’t get that. I wanted Awa to be the witness of what is happening to the Hyenas, then I have to materialise that. I wanted Awa to exist somewhere because it was not innocent that it was a woman being deaf. It was a bit of a provocation also. I grew up with Aliens. Aliens was the first sci-fi movie I saw and the first movie that struck me. I always envision heroes as being women, I grew up with Manga as well, and there were a lot of women being heroes in that. Having a female hero for me, I grew up with that, so for me that is the basis. Not a lot of filmmakers succeed in doing that. So I’m not saying that the movie is about her, but it was definitely about her birth. If there was a sequel you would definitely see Awa being something else after that.
The movie was originally two hours and twenty minutes before the version that you saw, so there was a lot with Awa. There was a lot with her ending, which is different to what you are seeing, which was going far after. It was a game between this hero [Chaka] and switching to this hero [Awa]. Showing that a hero is not always what you think.
Why should the Fantastic Fest audience seek this film out? What are they going to get from this film that they might not get from some others at the festival?
Because you have no African movies like it. I’m not being cocky because I did my research (laughs). I think there is no movie like it. If you’re very curious to see what we can say about Africa that you’ve never seen, and what we can show about Africa that you’ve probably never seen, I think it’s the one. I strongly think it’s the first of many, a big wave that is coming that a lot of people are not seeing. If you want to be at the curve of that wave and see what’s going to happen, then go see this one.
Saloum screens at Fantastic Fest on 30th September 2021.
