Me, a Black
Moi, Un Noir was Rouch’s first feature length film. Shot in Treichville, a slum/suburb of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, the film continues many of the themes of earlier work (especially Jaguar and Les Maitres Fous): immigration to the coastal towns, contact of colonizers and colonized, the effects of colonialism and proletarianization. An attempt to “mix fiction with reality,” it follows the daily routine of three young men from Niger working as casual laborers in Abidjan. The characters were asked to play out their lives in front of the camera. In a sense, the characters are seen as already living out “fictional reality” in Treichville, far from their homes and traditional lives in Niger.