Michel K Zongo’s Looking for My Brother screens on Wednesday 1 January at 20h00 GMT on Witness, Al Jazeera’s flagship documentary strand.
Joanny Zongo, aged 14, left his home in Burkina Faso in 1978 and travelled to the neigbouring Ivory Coast. Thousands of Burkinabe men see this trip as a rite of passage into adulthood and most expect to stay for a few years before returning home. But after a couple of years Joanny stopped sending letters home and never came back. Eighteen years later the family heard that Joanny had died years before.
Michel was just four years old when his brother Joanny left home. In 2011, now a filmmaker, he makes the same migrant journey and tries to meet people who knew his brother and to discover what really happened to Joanny.
“This is a remarkable film that captures the sense of how geographical distance still means something in Africa, and how it is possible for people to be away for years from their families and disappear,’ says Giles Trendle, Al Jazeera’s director of programming.
Looking for My Brother, Michel’s first full-length film, screened at Berlin and HotDocs, among other international film festivals, as Espoire Voyage and won the Best First Film Award at Doclisboa.
Visit http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/ for more information.
