A priest paints spirits into walls—then the walls start breathing.
Cyprien Tokoudagba is from the city of Abomey in the Benin Republic of West Africa, where he paints the religious houses of the vodun. Haas and his film crew follow Cyprien as he first paints and then takes part in the ceremony to open a new temple. The paintings include three vodun figures and several emblems, including a pipe and a duck. Cyprien explains his work in the context of the religion and takes the crew to film two other local ceremonies, one where the dead are believed to come back to instruct the living through wild dancing and, another, where women warriors perform their war dances.
Cinematography
Haas captures possession like weather—inevitable, alive.
Practical Effects
Every brushstroke is actual sacred craft, zero artifice.
Director
Philip Haas
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Haas made this as part of a larger project filming global 'magicians'—he treated Cyprien as equal to Western artists, radical for 1991.
The temple paintings are destroyed and repainted cyclically; the film preserves one iteration forever, which Cyprien found both gift and loss.
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