The Upright Women

Shot in West Africa and Australia, the legacy and assassination of Thomas Sankara define a moving portrait of West African women in the past and present.Three years in the making, the politically charged, feature documentary investigates today’s current sociopolitical climate and tackles the fight against gender imbalance in Burkina Faso, a forgotten land devastated by Western political intervention 30 years ago through the assassination of a leader who was at the forefront of gender equality. The stunning Cinéma Vérité intertwines with the archival treasures and life biopic of Sankara while the majestic backdrop of present-day Burkina Faso is discovered through the homecoming journey of ‘Sylvie’, a young Burkinabe woman from the village of Banfora, who guides a poetic passage through the progressive cities and traditional rural communities of the Southern Sahara. An original score by Thomas Pringle infuses the traditional sounds of West Africa with a continuous and contemporary low-frequency soundscape as the women’s presence and position in gold mining, forced marriage and domestic slavery are investigated throughout the country.