Patrick Blossier, AFC, reflects on his choices for shooting "Indomptables", by Thomas Ngijol

In Yaoundé, Commissioner Billong investigates the murder of a police officer. Both on the streets and within his own family, he struggles to maintain order. A man of principles and tradition, he is reaching breaking point.
Commissioner Billong is played by Tomas Ngijol, a humorist known for hosting a daily segment on Canal+’s Grand Journal and who has become one of France’s favorite comedians. Indomptables is an adaptation of a 1995 documentary, Un crime à Abidjan, directed by documentary filmmaker Mosco Lévi Boucault.

Patrick Blossier looks back on the making of the film :
"Thomas Ngijol saw this documentary when it was released in 1999. He was barely 20 years old and wasn’t yet an actor. He was impressed by this film set in Ivory Coast and kept it in mind, hoping to do something with it one day. Unlike the documentary, which is just a police thriller, Thomas wanted to tackle a second subject : the police commissioner’s family life and his difficulties as a father. This part is very autobiographical. It gives the film extra depth and resonates with the commissioner’s difficulty in exercising his authority."
The film sometimes resembles a documentary while maintaining a fictionalized staging and a strong character in every shot. The shoot was prepared and filmed very quickly. Patrick talks about a week of preparation on location : “And that was good because I didn’t want to prepare too much or anticipate too much in order to keep the documentary feel. I knew Mosco’s film well, so my preparation mainly consisted of immersing myself in it.”
You can feel that the camera is always accompanying the character, never jostling, gently complicit. The director of photography explains the technical setup of the shoot : "Thomas and I decided fairly early on to keep the look of Mosco’s film and shoot Indomptables like a documentary. As it happens, I’ve been involved in shooting two documentaries this year. The first was on the set of Costa Gavras’ latest film, Le Dernier souffle, lit by Nathalie Durand, AFC, and the second was in Ukraine, directed by Emmanuel Carrère, Des trains en guerre. It had been ages since I had shot a documentary on my own, with just the camera and sound. My last experience was on film with my Aaton in the last century ! I wanted to recapture the same sensations I had with the Aaton, the brilliant camera of the brilliant Jean-Pierre Beauviala. I can’t imagine filming while looking at a screen ; my right eye has to be glued to a viewfinder and the camera resting on my shoulder. I opted for the Sony FX6, which I customized. Colorist Jacky Lefresne, who I’ve been working with since I started shooting digitally, worked on a selection of LUTs, and I was very happy with the result. When we decided to shoot Thomas’s film entirely handheld, I immediately thought of the FX6. I’m 75 years old and I’m no longer able to carry a traditional camera around all day... I asked my assistant Marion Peyrollaz to work on a “filmic” setup around the FX6. Samuel Renollet, at RVZ, pointed us towards an Olympus series. Despite all the accessories needed for the assistants, the camera remains light and comfortable to carry.”

Some of the night shots have a careful contrast, particularly the one of the highway with cars driving in the foreground and the city lights in the background. How do you deal with the look when you have limited resources ? Patrick recalls : "Given the budget and shooting time, I knew I wouldn’t be able to light the scene. The two basic camera sensitivities are 800 and 12,800 ISO. I thought it was crazy to shoot at 12,800 ISO ! Before leaving for Cameroon, I did some tests in my street, which is very poorly lit, with a black-skinned extra. I was at 5.6 ! I projected these tests onto a big screen and found the result incredible. There was a slight fragility to the image that reminded me of Super 16, which I really liked. So we shot every night at ISO 12,800, keeping an eye on the highlights, which quickly blow out at that sensitivity."

It’s hard to imagine that the film was shot with little or no light, both for the night scenes—such as the torture scene in the middle of nowhere—and for the two main sets, the police station and the family home.
"For the torture scene, I wanted to see the city lights in the background, so I needed very low light. I just used car headlights. I also had a battery-powered spotlight that I could put anywhere, so I placed it on the ground out of shot to catch the faces a little and not be too radical. We didn’t have the time or the means to light sets like the police station or the hospital, but I liked this constraint, which put me in the same conditions as when shooting a documentary."
At the beginning of the film, there’s a power cut, as is common in African cities.
"We installed a simple 500W quartz lamp on an electric pole to simulate the blackout. It’s just this lamp that goes out, and then people take out their iPhones, their oil lamps... I actually used Soft Lights LEDs for the oil lamps. These are LEDs installed in oil lamps, and the flickering of the flame and the power are entirely controlled from a phone. There are scenes that I lit only with these lamps, notably the outdoor gym."
Indomptables depicts an uncompromising Africa, with a sense of powerlessness embodied by the police commissioner.
"The only point Thomas insisted on before shooting was that he didn’t want to make a ‘Senegalese’ film... I wondered why... Then I understood what he meant. It’s true that most films shot in Africa often feature beautiful landscapes and majestic baobab trees ! In his choice of locations, Thomas turned his back on this sugar-coated image of Africa. We shot in the real slums of Yaoundé, even though it’s complicated to be there filming with this latent violence. The film paints an unflinching portrait of Africa with this theme of violence, both that perpetrated by the police and that which the police commissioner brings home with him."

(Interview conducted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)