After living in France for over a decade, filmmaker Aïcha Chloé Borro returns to her native Burkina Faso on the death of her uncle – father to 22 children and patriarch of the family she left behind. The viewer may anticipate an incoming cultural clash between the Westernised director and her relatives deeply rooted in local customs and mentalities, yet the film strives for a much more complex discourse. Borro’s camera is not aimed at the friction between a Western and an African world, but at the growing and deepening fissures within a so-called traditional society, fissures brought to light by the dispute over what will happen to the patriarch’s house. One side of the family wants to sell it; for the other, it is an inalienable space that has seen the birth and death of generations of ancestors. Owing to Borro’s empathy and subtlety, combined with her power of expression and talent for making the particular resonate with the universal, what seems like a trivial drama, common to most families, becomes an exposé on the civilisational consequences of accelerated modernisation, post-colonialism, and globalisation. All with a hint of magic – the spirits of the ancestors are always keeping close. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)