Rewind & Play with Alain Gomis

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Nnenna Onuoha speaks with Alain Gomis about his latest film REWIND & PLAY (2022) which was selected to be the opening night film of the 25th edition of RIDM .

REWIND & PLAY follows American jazz pianist Thelonius Monk on a 1969 trip to Paris. Monk is in town to perform at the Salle Pleyel, and along the way becomes the subject of a French television program. Rewind & Play unfolds exclusively from the recovered rushes of this recording. And from this single event the film unravels complex subjects including the media’s objectification of Monk’s celebrity, and its simultaneous refusal to recognize his full humanity.

Throughout the interview, we witness painfully, how Monk’s responses, unsatisfactory to his interviewers, are dismissed, spoken over, and edited out. Yet, with a masterful delicacy, the film inter-cuts shots of him playing the piano, allowing his music to assert itself and interrupt the unbearable media machine that has attempted to enfold him.

In the conversation, Nnenna speaks with Alain Gomis about his interest in Thelonius Monk, and how he handled the challenges of representation in the making of this film. The conversation wraps up with some practical advice about how to honor one’s creative vision as a filmmaker, in what can sometimes be a very demanding industry.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Alain Gomis is a French-Senegalese filmmaker. He studied cinematography at the Sorbonne. After graduating he organized and facilitated video production workshops for immigrant youth in Nanterre. By the age of twenty-six, he had already made three short films: Tourbillons, Tout le monde peut se tromper, and the documentary Caramels et chocolats. In 2001, Gomis directed his first feature film, L’Afrance. Gomis' 2012 film, Tey, was awarded the Etalon de Yenenga at FESPACO in 2012. His films often fall under the subject of young immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. His 2017 film Félicité won the grand jury prize at the Berlinale and the Étalon d’or again at FESPACO. It was also selected as the Senegalese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, making the December shortlist. Alain Gomis regularly gives production and writing workshops, and, in 2019, he and Aissatou Diop created the Yennenga Center in Dakar to promote independent film production in Senegal and Africa.

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher and artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her films and videos centre Afrodiasporic voices to explore monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the US. A second strand of her work focuses on archiving Black experience in the present to chronicle the practice of care and repair for ourselves and each other.

Nnenna is currently a doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam. She holds a BA in History, Literature, and Anthropology from Harvard College, an MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Documentary Filmmaking from DocNomads.

She was a 2021 participant of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnen Projekt and Berlin Program for Artists. She is also a 2021 fellow in the project “Global Memories of German Colonialism” at the University of Hamburg.