EVEN IF YOU PRAY, YOU WILL NOT ENTER PARADISE
Director DIAGNE CHANEL
Countries France
Duration 52 min
Synopsis
I arrived in the Senegal when I was six years old. I realized rapidly that certain people, Blacks Africans, were mistreated by the Moors who had tiny shops; I was frightened to see their almost animal-like situation of enslavement. Witness of this slavery and of a racism that seemed invisible to all, I decided that one day I would relate what, to me, seemed a real horror. Even if you pray, you will not enter Paradise…is the death of an illusion, the illusion that slavery belongs to the past. This flm groups the testimony of a number of Mauritanians: historians, a former diplomat, journalists, soldiers, victims of State racism and of the ethnic cleansing policy of their government, as well as of two Mauritanians enslaved as children who managed to escape after many long years of cruel treatment. Each of them speaks of the way in which this repression is carried out at all levels of society.
I arrived in the Senegal when I was six years old. I realized rapidly that certain people, Blacks Africans, were mistreated by the Moors who had tiny shops; I was frightened to see their almost animal-like situation of enslavement. Witness of this slavery and of a racism that seemed invisible to all, I decided that one day I would relate what, to me, seemed a real horror. Even if you pray, you will not enter Paradise…is the death of an illusion, the illusion that slavery belongs to the past. This flm groups the testimony of a number of Mauritanians: historians, a former diplomat, journalists, soldiers, victims of State racism and of the ethnic cleansing policy of their government, as well as of two Mauritanians enslaved as children who managed to escape after many long years of cruel treatment. Each of them speaks of the way in which this repression is carried out at all levels of society.