// The Big Everything
Aminatou Echard
// France, Belgique // 2025
// 119 min // Couleur // 1.77
SYNOPSIS
How’s life? How’s the big Everything? Garba asks Nicole. For both of them, the “Big Everything” encompasses family, politics, History, daily life, the stars, small things, and time passing like the wind.
My name is Aminatou and I'm white. With this first name, my mother, Nicole Echard, an ethnologist in Niger from 1964 to 1994, left me her fieldwork archives, her 16mm films, and her correspondence with her main assistant in Niger, Garba Maïgoye. Nicole is part of a new generation of ethnologists who are personally involved in their fieldwork.
I invited art students from Niamey to take charge of these archives. We reinterpret these texts and confront the same questions of domination and colonization, which are still relevant today. The young people look at Nicole and me. A coup d'état brought the filming to an end. History catches up with us. The present is here. The young people of Niger are here. This is their story. This must be their gaze.
TEAM
BIOGRAPHY
Aminatou Echard studied of Ethnomusicology and cinema. As an artist who works with experimental film and documentary, Aminatou's focus is how space transforms people and how people inhabit spaces. She conveys this idea by exploring the relationship between sound and image.
Fieldwork is a crucial element in her artistic practice. After four years of working in Bolivia in ethnomusicology, she has started a new stage in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) in 2006 by collecting images and sounds to gain an understanding of the specific relationship between spaces and people.
In 2007 she does Kyrghyz sketches, a short experimental film from the first collected material and in 2010 Broadway, a documentary produced by the G.R.E.C et Jamilia in 2018, a Super 8 feature film produced by 529 Dragons, presented at the Forum Berlinale 2018 and at Cinéma du Réel. (Awards of “Jury Documentaire” and “Prix Documentaire sur Grand Ecran” in Festival International de films d’Amiens, Award of “jury young students” in festival Isreal of Nuoro)
News
- 15 mai de 17h à 21h
Vernissage de l’exposition Ces voix qui m'assiègent...- Cité Internationale des arts
- 16 mai à 19h
Live documentary performance de Mila Turajlic consacré à son travail sur les archives - Cycle La recherche et ses récits, Le Bal
- 18-21 mai
Projections et rencontres avec Mila Turajlic de Non Alignés et Ciné-Guerrillas, Festival Etonnants Voyageurs, St Malo
- 22 mai à 18h
Rencontre et dialogue entre Mila Turajlic et Elaine Mohktefi (militante anti-raciste et anticoloniale, ancienne du FLN), MEP
- 23 mai à 19h
Projection du film Non Alignés (présenté par Carine Chichkowsky, productrice), Parti Communiste Français, Paris