Sweden, Burkina Faso, France and Qatar / 2017 / 83mins / Documentary / Mooré and French

A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl’s school to become car mechanics. The classmates become mutual ports of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life-changing transition into becoming adults, in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at the school in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds at showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with many warm, laughs, heartbreak and depth.

Theresa Traore Dahlberg

Theresa Traore Dahlberg is a visual artist and filmmaker who formulates and mediates engaging complex, narratives through sculpture, photography, and film. Her films narrate stories in the expanded field of documentary including themes such as representation of the other, by questioning how individuals, events and places are perceived, interpreted and understood. She finds her working material in everyday life, encounters with people from different places play an important role. Traore Dahlberg’s sculptural works often take a point of departure in the material itself, as a physical material and as a container of histories, ideas, and notions. The artist pays attention to production, working conditions, workers identities and fates of life, creating art that reflects the complexity of class, women's roles, and post-colonialism. Traore Dahlberg draws from her own experiences of being anchored in two political and social cultures, Sweden and Burkina Faso, and from the implication of living in a contemporary European context. Learn More