Democratic Republic of the Congo and France / 2011 / 52mins / Documentary / French

Claude Haffner, daughter of a French father and Congolese mother, sets off for Congo in search of her African identity. Her journey brings her face to face with her sense of otherness, both in Congo and back home in France.

Claude Haffner

Claude Haffner is a French-Congolese director and production manager of documentary films. She studied documentary filmmaking at the Altermedia School in Paris (2002). She directed her first "film-essay" titled Ko Bongisa Mutu (Arrange your head) in a Congolese hair salon in Paris. In 2004, she filmed La Canne musicale (The Musical Cane), a promenade with the French filmmaker / ethnographer Jean Rouch, a few days before his death. After two years of research on African Cinema, her documentary D'une fleur double et de 4000 autres (Of a Double-Headed Flower and 4,000 Others) focused on African Cinema history, as analyzed by her father, Pierre Haffner, one of the first critics of this cinema (2005). The same year, Claude Haffner completed her Masters Degree at Sorbonne University. Claude Haffner moved to South Africa in 2005. She worked as a Production Manager and Researcher on the docu-drama The Manuscripts of Timbuktu by Zola Maseko (2009). She then worked as a Production Manager and Researcher for the feature docu-drama By Any Means Necessary by Ramadan Suleman. Claude Haffner also gave classes on African Cinema at two Johannesburg-based film schools: AFDA and Big Fish. She went back to France in 2011 to achieve her documentary Footprints of My Other (Noire ici, blanche là-bas). She is now based in Paris. Learn More