Amina Weira’s Anger in the Wind: A premonitory tale of intertwined subjectivities

Abstract

This article analyses Amina Weira’s Anger in the Wind (2016). It argues that Weira’s documentary tells the story of slowly dying men through an exploration of a failed Anthropocene mediated by subjectivity and memory. Behind an almost casual handling of the camera, Weira casts a keen sympathetic eye on the ‘environmentally embattled’ populations of her native town, Arlit. Anger in the Wind is a documentary of painful, angry, recriminatory words; it tactfully yet pointedly exposes the devastation of the local ecosystems by staging the life stories of men and women who now realize that they were seen as disposable entities, not worthy of a dignified life cycle, fit for sacrifice at the altar of western technological prowess and comfort. As much as a testimony, Anger in the Wind is a Bamako style indictment of a destructive way of inhabiting the earth and a Hyenas’ style call to collective resistance.