Wend Kuuni (1982) User Reviews

This is a story of belonging and memory.

[maple-2 · 7/10 · 26 October 2002]

The film opens with a confrontation: a woman, whose husband has disappeared in the bush, is being forced by her husbands family to marry another brother so the husbands infant son will be raised in the family. She runs away to a remote village where the family cannot find her and raises her son in poverty as an outsider. Several years later, when the outsider is blamed for bringing bad luck in the form of an infant's death, she and her son are run out of the remote village.

Most of the story is told from the point of view of the young son, after he is found mute in the savanna and has been given the name Wend Kuuni by his adopting family. Only when his speech returns after several more years do we learn of his mother's flight from her ancestral village and their flight from the mob at the second village. But it is important to understand this history as a contrast to the Wend Kuuni's adoption into a family and sense of belonging in the third village.

Nice look at traditional West Africa

[SaaBrian · 7/10 · 9 May 1999]

Wend Kuuni gives an interesting slice of life in a traditional West African society. The film was made in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) so I assume that's where it is set. The plot is ostensibly about a mute boy who is adopted. He was traumautized into muteness after he and his mother were chased out of their old village because she was thought to have been a witch. She died of exhaustion (literally) and he was found by a traveller who took him to another village. He is unable to communicate any of his past for a long time but while walking in a field at night, he views a corpse hanging from a tree and that stuns him into speech. The story was ok, but its forte was more in the presentation of very traditional life and customs in this West African country. It has a very slow, meandering pace to it, much like the culture itself. Not a chef d'oeuvre, but interesting nonetheless.

Silenced by the past.

[morrison-dylan-fan · 8/10 · 15 February 2020]

Looking down the list of what films from African countries I've downloaded.I realised that I had somehow stupidly overlooked the titles from Burkina Faso. The first movie to pop up from the country,I got ready to embrace god's gift.

View on the film:

Staying silent for the majority of the film, Serge Yanogo gives a superb, subtle performance as kouni, whose coiled up body language and withdrawn gaze to all who confront him, is used by Yanogo to speak volume of the severity of the incident which led to his silenced. Glimpsing the incident is fractured flashbacks,writer/director Gaston Kabore grinds a Neo-Realist atmosphere, standing back in elegant long-shots catching the daily routines of the locals Kouni watches.

Met by locals asking why he is silent, Kabore hints at the anguished within Kouni, on lingering close-ups to his stark face. Named as "God's Gift" by the locals, the screenplay by Kabore gracefully pairs the splintered flashbacks of Kouni with the daily grind taken on by the locals who welcome silent Kouni in.

A moving study of loss, silence and healing set in a West African village

[Rigor · 10/10 · 17 May 1999]

This is a wonderful film about a young boy who is found abandoned outside a village by a traveling trader. The trader takes the boy to the nearest village and he is lovingly raised by a family as their own son. The boy has been struck mute by trauma he experienced in his childhood and we witness his adaptation to his new life and the development of an intense friendship between the boy and his adoptive sister. The film has a lot to say about gender relationships, youth and the power of love to heal past trauma.