The first West African feature film to deal with homosexuality, Dakan begins with the most sexually explicit opening scene in African cinema. Rather than showing a rural landscape or an urban panorama, locating the characters in a recognizable social context, the camera focuses instead on an isolated couple locked in a clandestine embrace in a sports car at night. The shot becomes even more transgressive when we realize the couple is two young men. When one of them later tells his mother he’s attracted to another man, she replies, “Since time began, it’s never happened. Boys don’t do that. That’s all there is to it.” Dakan is the story of two men who, by coming out, disappear and become invisible to their families and society, because their society has no language which recognizes their love. Sori and Manga are well-to-do schoolmates in urban Guinea, deeply in love and remarkably open about their feelings. Both are the only children of single parents who have invested their whole emotional lives in their sons. Each parent takes steps to end what they see as a doomed relationship which threatens their families' futures, and for a while the children attempt to go along with their parents’ wishes. Trying to forget Sori, Manga even attempts a sexual relationship with a young white woman. But in the end the young men cannot change, and must accept their love as destiny, even though their future is uncertain. While coming out may have become primetime fare in the US, this film had to be filmed clandestinely in the director’s native Guinea. Because Dakan both challenges the idea that there is a universal gay culture and debunks the notion that homosexuality is non-existent or foreign to African societies, this moving and thoughtful film has provoked controversial discussions at several international film festivals. But beyond its taboo topic, Dakan is a contemporary reinterpretation of the age-old Romeo and Juliet conflict between love and social convention. In director Mohamed Camara’s words: “I made this film to pay tribute to those who express their love in whatever way they feel it, despite society’s efforts to repress it.”
