Genre Drama

Our Problems (2004)

Item: Our Problems
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Our Problems (2004)

Guinea, a small West African nation on the Atlantic coast, has a modest but genuine cinematic tradition, one that rarely reaches mainstream Western audiences and even more rarely receives the kind of sustained critical attention it deserves. Our Problems (2004) is a short drama, running to around thirty minutes, that plants itself firmly inside that tradition: a co-production between France and Guinea, brought together by Les Films de Cléopâtre and Djoliba Productions, and set against the grinding reality of a refugee camp in Guinea Conakry. The film takes as its subject a family fractured by poverty and displacement, following two brothers whose attempts to survive tip them towards petty crime and then something considerably darker, and a young woman who faces her own impossible choices in the same desperate circumstances. Their grandmother, herself a refugee, is the film's moral anchor, attempting to hold together what the world around her is pulling apart. It is the kind of subject matter that demands honesty rather than sentiment, and it is a subject with genuine, ongoing weight: Guinea has hosted waves of refugees from neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone across several decades, and the social pressures the film describes were, at the time of its production, far from abstract.

The film was directed by Cheick Fantamady Camara, a Guinean filmmaker whose work sits within a broader French-African co-production landscape, a mode of filmmaking that has occasionally produced films of real power, as anyone who has read the site's look at Sugar Cane Alley will know. The cast, led by Mohamed Lamine Bangoura, Assata Camara, Balla Moussa Keita, Awanatou Makaty and Francis Sylla, are drawn from Guinean performance backgrounds rather than international name recognition, which is entirely in keeping with the project's documentary-adjacent ambitions. There is something to be said for that kind of casting: it can produce a raw, grounded quality that polished studio productions rarely manage. Whether it does so here, however, is a question the review below addresses rather directly. For context, the film arrives from the same broad French co-production tradition that has given the site material to write about elsewhere, including Mustang and, in a very different register, Little by Little, both of which found their own ways of engaging with social conditions through a fictional frame. Our Problems is working in recognisably similar territory, at least in aspiration, though its means are considerably more modest.

A-Z World Movie Tour Guinea I wanted to like Our Problems. Truly. The premise (a glimpse into Guinean refugee camps through the lens of a struggling family) feels urgent, necessary, even. But somewhere between noble intent and execution, this film stumbles into a mess of tonal whiplash, undercooked subplots, and a narrative that feels less like a story and more like a checklist of social issues. The film’s attempts at allegory (each character embodying a systemic problem) come across as clunky rather than insightful. Instead of weaving themes together organically, it feels like the scriptwriter scribbled some hollyoaks plot points on sticky notes and slapped them onto scenes. The intercutting between storylines isn’t seamless, it’s jarring, like flipping channels between documentaries mid-sentence. And while the performances are earnest, the characters themselves are thinly sketched, their motivations muddled. Even the humor (meant to highlight generational clashes) lands with all the subtlety of a sitcom laugh track. A scene where a grandmother quizzes her grandson about her teeth should be charming, but it’s undercut by the film’s relentless bleakness. One minute you’re chuckling at familial banter, the next you’re watching a teen coerced into crime. The whiplash is exhausting. Technically, it’s rough around the edges (sound quality fluctuates, pacing drags in stretches), but the real issue is ambition overreach. It wants to be a sweeping portrait of resilience and systemic failure, but ends up feeling like a well-meaning lecture with shaky camerawork.

What stays with me, thinking it over after the fact, is the frustration of a film that clearly has something worth saying and simply cannot find the right way to say it. The refugee camp setting deserved a more disciplined hand, and the family at the centre of it deserved fuller lives on screen. I've sat with films from this era and region that manage, even on tight resources and limited runtime, to make you feel the full weight of their characters' circumstances, and this one, for all its good intentions, never quite gets there. If anything, it left me wanting to seek out more of what Guinean cinema can do when everything clicks into place. That film, I suspect, is still out there.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2025-06-26

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