THE VILLAGE OF BAMBOULA

A documentary film by YOANN DE MONTGRAND and FRANÇOIS TCHERNIA

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At the beginning, there was a simple chocolate cookie ingenuously named ‘‘Bamboula’’ by the famous French food company Saint-Michel. At the end, there are Ivorian men and women, children and adults, who live held in a zoo to offer their folklore as a show to French tourists. Between the two, there is a chain of innocuous events that intertwine largescale food industry stakes, a local entrepreneurial adventure supported by the public authorities and a dream of Africa “coming to your town” with unsuspected consequences.
We are in 1994, in Western France, and here is the story of the ‘‘village of Bamboula’’, or how a children’s cookie with a dubious name became the emblem of what appears to be the last human zoo in France.