The Strong Man of Bureng
Title: The Strong Man of Bureng
Directed by
Country: Finland, Gambia, Italy
Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes 37 seconds
SYNOPSIS
Former UN soldier Essa has fled the Gambia for Finland, where he has successfully set up a business that provides for his family. Back in his hometown Bureng, he is celebrated as a hero. During a visit home, world events catch up with him: The coronavirus outbreak jeopardises Essa’s return to Europe and his application to renew his residence permit, plunging him into one of the most serious crises of his life.
“The Strong Man of Bureng” is both a contemporary odyssey and an intimate story of the deep motivations that have brought a person to leave his own country in an effort to satisfy universal needs.
Directors’ Bio
Mauro Bucci
Mauro Bucci is an Italian award-winning filmmaker and independent researcher working in the field of Visual Anthropology. He is particularly concerned with film’s potential for studying and understanding human experiences and cultural practices. He has authored scientific essays on ethnographic cinema for both Italian and international journals and books.
Mauro Bucci worked as a one-man crew shooting video, recording sound, and editing footage for “Hotel Splendid”, his first work as a cinematographic author. The film portrays the lives of an African community hosted within an Italian hotel that has been transformed into an emergency refugee camp. This documentary, the result of a long-term ethnographic fieldwork that followed the participant observation method, has been screened worldwide on multiple occasions.
Mauro Bucci’s latest film, “The Strong Man of Bureng”, explores the theme of circular or return migrations.
Mauro Bucci has held several seminars, summer schools and master classes focused on the theories and techniques of representing social phenomena through cinema.
Director Statement
“The Strong Man of Bureng” is a documentary film made over 4 years of filming and field research conducted at different times and living in close contact with the people filmed. The documentary is the result of a multisite ethnography between Gambia, Finland and Italy and it is a project on the topic of circular or return migrations.
The film explores the centrality of interpersonal relationships between migrants, their families, and their homelands: it portrays the invaluable role played by this intangible web of human connections – made of social expectations, values, responsibilities, and pressures – in shaping the dynamics and patterns of the diaspora phenomenon that links Africa and Europe.
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