Bobia, a rural village in Côte d’Ivoire, keeps a buried secret. The war has one memory, and it is three generations long. In a place where history is carried through stories, the memory of this largely erased war survives through children’s dreams, adult silences, and a mother’s nightly bedtime tales.
SYNOPSIS
Set in Bobia, a rural village in Côte d’Ivoire, Feu de Lune follows eleven-year-old twins Matanti and Attea Yarabe as they come of age in a community shaped by a largely unspoken history of war.
Their uncle, Hyacinthe Yarabe, survived the War of 1970 as a child, spending ten days hiding in the forest while soldiers raided the village. Decades later, he returns to Bobia to complete an unfinished manuscript about what he experienced. But how do you pass a history of violence on to children without passing on its fear?
At home, the twins’ mother, Christianne, tells them that everything she knows about the war was passed down through stories from her own mother. Together, the family begins transforming Hyacinthe’s memories into a tale for the children: a story of foreign tigers invading Bobia, children hiding in the forest, magical spirits, and a village threatened by fire.
As the twins navigate school, friendship, family, and the challenges of growing up, this tale begins to move between generations. Elders revisit memories of the war; children inherit, reinterpret, and embody the stories they are given. The boundaries between documentary and narrative gradually dissolve.
Feu de Lune is a film about what happens when history is not preserved in textbooks or archives, but carried from one generation to the next through memory, imagination, and storytelling. It asks how a community can remember its past while giving its children the freedom to imagine a future beyond it.
Director Statement
I made this film because my father survived a war that was never written into the history books, but remained alive in the stories he carried from his childhood. Now, as he returns to the village where he grew up, I am interested in what happens when that memory is passed to the next generation—not as a historical record, but as a tale. Through my family and the children of our community, Feu de Lune asks how we inherit histories of violence, and how storytelling can transform what we remember, what we carry, and what we imagine for the future.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Dominic Yarabe
Dominic Yarabe is an award-winning Ivorian-American filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist.
Her films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, and other festivals, museums and cultural institutions internationally. She is a MacDowell Fellow, Harvard Film Study Center fellow, Locarno Residency winner, and a Duke Center for Documentary Studies DocX Residency Fellow.
She received her MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Yarabe's work is informed by her research in black visual culture, particularly the ways in which image-making might subvert the colonial gaze both in real-time and through its long-term effects within modern forms of digital media.
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