« Certain figures in our lives are the fruit of our imagination », says an off-camera voice while the camera travels down the river hugging the treetops. « Once upon a time there was my own story … » It starts with an escape down the river, when Ekuya, an evil forest spirit, kills the girl’s father and burns their hut. The young girl is taken in by a woman who calls her Owanga, « the glimmer of dawn ». They establish a mother and daughter relationship however Owanga , traumatised like Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni, cannot speak. She does not regain the power speech until she kills the spirit, bringing the rupture between fiction and reality full cycle … Time flows like the river of life in the film and Owanga’s story, taken straight from oral narrative, subtly reminds us that in the great initiation ritual of life dominating your fears involves fighting your own demons.
