OUAGA GIRLS

Credits

Name: OUAGA GIRLS

Country: Schweden, Burkina Faso, Frankreich, Katar

Year of publication: 2017

Format: digital

Color: color

Language : OF m. engl. UT

Duration: 83 Minuten

Direction: Traore Dahlberg, Theresa

Camera: Mikler, Iga; Winqvist, Sophie

Editing: Strauss, Alexandra; Lagerqvist, Margareta

Sound: Bjerknes, Erik

Abstract

OUAGA GIRLS is a poetic film about women who want to determine their own paths in life. The film accompanies a group of young women who go to a vocational school in Burkina Faso to train as car mechanics. With an unemployment rate of 52 percent among young people in Burkina Faso, it is by no means easy for them to challenge the traditional roles of women and to enter the man’s world of a car repair garage. Director Theresa Traore Dahlberg has family in Burkina Faso and also lived there for part of her childhood. Due to the close relationship she developed with the film’s main protagonists, she has again succeeded in making a layered and sensitive documentary, just as she did with her graduation film TAXI SISTERS about female taxi drivers in Dakar, which was shown at the 2012 Afrika Film Festival Köln. The Sweden-based director had the following to say about her new coming-of-age film: "With OUAGA GIRLS I want to capture the trembling time before choices are made, the time before everything will be changed. When dreams, desires and courage get mixed up with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be."