The Château

Lisbeth Holtedahl
Norway 2018 | 113 min | engl. subtitled

Thu, 30-May-19 07:30 PM

A por­trait of one of the rich­est Cameroon­ian indus­tri­al­ists Al Hajji Mohamadou Ous­man­ou Abbo. Filmed over a period of more than ten years. The red thread of the story is the con­struc­tion of Al Hajji’s spec­tac­u­lar palace on the out­skirts of his native town, Ngaoundéré in North­ern Cameroon. The camera fol­lows Al Hajji on var­i­ous arenas in France, Italy and Cameroon. We learn about his rela­tion­ships and nego­ti­a­tions with the local pop­u­la­tion and Euro­pean arti­sans, who work on the con­struc­tion site, his busi­ness part­ners in the coun­try and abroad as well as local, region­al and nation­al author­i­ties and politi­cians. Through a por­trait of this man, Al Hajji Abbo, as well as through his “love-hate” rela­tion­ship with his Euro­pean part­ners, the film tries to grasp the equal­ly ambiva­lent and com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship between the rich and the poor and between the Global North and the Global South. Pro­gres­sive­ly, the spec­ta­tor dis­cov­ers that the rich man from the poor coun­try can offer new insights about you and me, about poor and rich coun­tries alike.