Munumunu [walkabout] is a 45 minute-long sequence shot created in collaboration with donso musician Adama ‘Kanké’ Sanou. Kanké lives in Bolomakoté, Bobo Dioulasso, and makes a living as a musician playing at festivals for the local hunters associations. He asked me to record a ‘music video’ and I accepted – little did I know that he had in mind such a long tour of the neighbourhood with his apprentices, in which he would praise hunters he met on the way but also visit master hunters he knows. We start from Kanké’s family court and finish near the stream that borders Bolomakoté.

I like to think that the way in which the musician has to improvise in his chance encounters finds similarities in the way I have to respond to the situation as I film it. Both music and footage are uninterrupted, and the duration of the performance is the duration of the film. Visual anthropology certainly has a fascination with sequence shots – just think about Rouch’s work (Gare du Nord, a fiction film which is actually made of two shots edited seamlessly or Tourou et Bitti) or the more recent People’s Park by Cohn & Sniadecki. You can see more travelling sequence shots in my film Living the Weather.

Munumunu means, in Jula, to take a walk around – an expression that is also used by hunters to refer to the hunt.