Review of Ouaga Girls (2017)
Seen in 2017.
Students of a vocational school in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
The focal characters aren’t particularly interesting, and the high frequency of close-ups on them was painfully apparent to me sitting in the front row at GIFF 2017. Teen pregnancy is defended as normal behaviour, without much thought. There are some funny details: Nobody drives in this movie about car mechanics. We see five electrical specialists at Bert Ella Garage (funny in Swedish) huddled around an engine, apparently trying to repair it without so much as a volt meter on camera; what are those guys going to do when everything’s on a CAN bus? The principal of the educational center congratulates the graduating class of women on picking what he still calls a man’s job.