A group of young women tweak machines and hammer away at a school for auto mechanics in Ouagadougou in this poetic story about life choices, sisterhood and the endeavour to find your own way. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.
In this hybrid documentary, we glimpse the lives of young women training to become mechanics in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Amidst the quirks of their training, they find solace in their sisterhood. Ouaga Girls proves itself a contemplative film that examines the determination needed to break into a male dominated profession. The rigour demonstrated by the girls establishes this film as an important watch.
Kika Memeh & Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, FOCUS Curators
Presented by
Bintou Konate, Chantale Nissougou, Mouniratou Sedogo, Catherine Nea, Dina Tapsoba, Marthe Ouedraogo
Sweden/Burkina Faso/
France/Qatar
2017
In French with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Producer
David Herdies
Cinematography
Iga Mikler, Sophie Winquist
Editor
Alexandra Strauss, Margareta Lagerqvist
Original Music
Christoffer Roth, Seydou Richard Traore, Jenny Wilson
Theresa Traore Dahlberg
Theresa Traore Dahlberg (born 1983 in Värnamo, Sweden) resides and works in Stockholm. She studied film at the New School in New York and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 2017, she graduated with a Master of Fine Art from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her film, The Ambassador’s Wife (2018), won the Tempo Short Film Award and screened internationally at festivals such as TIFF, Berlin Critics’ Week, Clermont-Ferrand, and Telluride. Her first film, Taxi Sisters (2011), and her first feature-length documentary, Ouaga Girls (2017), continue to be widely shown around the world.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.
Agatha's Almanac
Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.
Follies
After two kids and 16 years of marriage, François and Julie decide to open up their relationship in a bid to rekindle their dwindling sex life. A painfully hilarious and brutally honest depiction of love, sex, and intimacy in the age of the internet.
Paying for It
Talk about a hall of mirrors! Sook-Yin Lee wittily adapts the graphic novel of the same name by her ex-boyfriend, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown, about the end of their relationship and Brown's subsequent decision to start paying for sex.