Best Feature Length Documentary
SamhainBaucogna International Film Festival – Italy, Spain, Morocco – February 2024 Best Documentary Editing Award – Italian Docu-Film Category
COLIFFE – Coliseum International Film Festival – Rome, Italy – December 2023
🇱🇻 Riga Pasaules Film Festival (RPFF) – Riga, Latvia
Incoming screening: 25 – 28 April 2024.
Place, time, and other info: https://shorturl.at/dfGKZ
🇮🇹 Festival internazionale Segni della Notte – Urbino, Italy
Incoming screening: 10 – 14 April 2024.
Place, time, and other info: https://www.segnidellanotte.com/
🇬🇧 Rapport Festival of Films – London, UK
🇮🇹 SamhainBaucogna International Film Festival – Italy, February 2024
🇬🇧 Activists Without Borders Film Festival – Manchester, UK, December 2023
🇮🇹 COLIFFE – Coliseum International Film Festival – Status: premiere – Rome, Italy, December 2023
🇲🇰 KRATFEST – Kratovo International Festival of Ethnological Documentary Film – Status: work in progress – Macedonia, October 2023
THE STORY
An engaging journey through Gambia, Finland, and Italy, following the story of Essa, a former UN soldier and refugee, and his struggle to achieve well-being for himself and his loved ones. The film explores how the protagonist successfully established a business in Europe to financially help his village in Africa: Bureng. However, the outbreak of the Coronavirus gravely challenges Essa’s privileged position and his family’s stability, leading him to one of the most serious crises of his life.
“The Strong Man of Bureng” is both a contemporary odyssey and an intimate story of the deep motivations that have brought a person to leave his own country in an effort to satisfy universal needs.
GENESIS, ETHNOGRAPHY, and PRODUCTION
“The Strong Man of Bureng” is a film made over 4 years of filming and field research conducted at different times. The film is the result of a multisite ethnography between Gambia, Finland and Italy. “The Strong Man of Bureng”, a completely free-standing work, tells the story of one of the asylum seekers who appeared in the film “Hotel Splendid” (Mauro Bucci, 2016), after completing the procedures to get the refugee status. “The Strong Man of Bureng” explores the centrality of interpersonal relationships between migrants, their families, and their homelands: it portrays the invaluable role played by this intangible web of human connections – made of social expectations, values, responsibilities, and pressures – in shaping the dynamics and patterns of the diaspora phenomenon that links Africa and Europe.
THE FILMMAKER
Mauro Bucci is an Italian award-winning filmmaker and independent researcher working in the field of Ethnographic Cinema. He has written scientific essays about ethnographic cinema for Italian and international publications. He worked as a one-man crew shooting video, recording sound, and editing footage for “Hotel Splendid” (2016), his first work as a cinematographic author. This documentary film, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, was screened in over 200 events around the world. “The Strong Man of Bureng” (2023), his next documentary, is a work based on the subject of return migration. Mauro Bucci is particularly concerned with film’s potential for studying and understanding human experiences and cultural practices.
FILM SCREENSHOTS
FESTIVAL SCREENINGS
INFO & CREDITS
Genre: ethnographic documentary
Country: Italy
Lenght: 75 minutes
Produced, filmed, edited by Mauro Bucci
Featuring: Essa J. Darboe, Yankuba Darboe,
Kaddy Darboe, Fatima Darboe and Elisa Salmi
Fieldwork advice: Essa J. Darboe, Baomar Touray
Translations: Mauro Bucci, Liza Tripp, Essa J. Darboe, Baomar Touray, Youssuf Darboe
Thanks to: all the Inhabitants of Bureng, Elisa Salmi, the street boys of Rome-Tiburtina
Copyright © 2023 Mauro Bucci
FOR ANY INQUIRES CONTACTS US:
E-mail: bosforo@gmail.com – Phone/WhatsApp: +39 389 8031690 – Facebook