Genre Documentary

Conakry (2013)

Item: Conakry
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Conakry (2013)

I'll be straight with you: this is one of the hardest films I've had to write about on the A-Z World Movie Tour, not because it challenged me emotionally or intellectually, but because there's barely anything here to get a grip on. Conakry is Guinea-Bissau's entry on my list, and it clocks in at twelve minutes. Twelve. And within those twelve minutes, the format is about as stripped-back as it gets: a woman reading aloud from sheets of paper while a slideshow of images relating to the country's former anti-colonialist leader plays behind her.

That's it. That's the film.

Now, I want to be fair here, because I do think the subject matter has genuine weight. Guinea-Bissau's history of resistance against colonial rule is a rich and important story, and the figure being discussed clearly meant a great deal to the people who made this. There's a real passion lurking somewhere beneath the surface, and I respect that this was put together by people who cared. But caring about your subject and communicating it effectively to an audience are two very different things, and unfortunately Conakry manages the former while almost completely failing at the latter.

The production values are rough, and I mean rough in a way that actually gets in the way of the content. The sound quality is poor throughout, and at several points the microphone cuts out or distorts badly enough that you lose what's being said entirely. At other moments you can hear children crying in the background. I'm not going to be snobbish about low-budget filmmaking. Some of my favourite documentaries have been made on a shoestring, and I've watched films from this tour that were clearly made without much in the way of resources but still found a way to pull you in. Think about something like Lost Boy in Juba (2017), which dealt with difficult subject matter in a way that was genuinely moving despite its modest means. The difference is craft and intention. Even on a tiny budget, you can choose your angles, consider your sound, think about how to frame your images so they do more than just sit there.

Here, the slideshow images feel like they've been assembled quickly rather than curated. They don't breathe or build. They just appear, one after another, while the narration continues in the same flat register. There's no sense of rhythm, no sense of the filmmakers thinking about how the visuals and the words might work together to create something more than the sum of their parts.

And then, just when you've settled in and accepted the film for what it is, it ends. Completely abruptly. No conclusion, no final thought, no sense of arrival anywhere. It stops like a car running out of petrol on a dual carriageway. You sit there for a second wondering if your video file has corrupted.

I genuinely don't enjoy writing a review like this. The A-Z World Movie Tour has introduced me to corners of world cinema I'd never have found otherwise, and part of the joy of it is that even the most obscure entries often surprise you. But I have to be honest, and honestly, Conakry doesn't work as a documentary. It's a slideshow presentation with audio problems, and it doesn't give its subject the treatment it deserves. If you want to understand the history and politics of Guinea-Bissau, you'd be far better served reading an article or finding a more considered piece of documentary filmmaking on the region.

One and a half stars, and most of that is goodwill towards the subject matter rather than the execution.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-06-26

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