“How’s life? How’s the Big Everything?” Garba asks Nicole. For them, the “Big Everything” holds family, politics, history, everyday life, the stars, small things, and time passing like the wind. Nicole Echard, an ethnologist who worked in Niger from 1964 to 1994, left her daughter fieldwork archives and letters with her assistant, Garba Maïgoye. Decades later, as the daughter revisits these materials, personal memory, colonial history, and the complexities of the present begin to overlap.

The Big Everything follows filmmaker Aminatou Echard as she retraces the path of her mother, anthropologist Nicole Echard, who conducted research in Niger from 1964 to 1994. Working with her mother’s 16mm films and her correspondence with collaborators, Echard reinterprets the archive, linking traces of the past to the challenges of the present and probing the entanglement of colonial legacies with contemporary Niger.
The film’s title names its expansive method: “the Big Everything” encompasses family and politics, history and minor details, and time passing like the wind. Through letters, recordings, and archival images, Echard turns this entanglement into a transformative gesture. She shares the materials with students, who question their meanings, blind spots, and the power relations embedded within them. Personal memory collides with national history, colonial inheritance, and structures of domination that persist into the present, as past and present fold into one another. Moving in a spiral rather than a straight line, the film resists premature closure. Instead, it embraces uncertainty as a necessary condition for understanding and imagining a different future.

• ProducerCarine CHICHKOWSKY (Survivance), Beata SABOOVA, Vincent METZINGER (Naoko Films)
• Cinematography Sylvain DUFAYARD, Aminatou ECHARD, Abdoul-Kader Amadou MAIGA, Chaibou Koraou AÏCHA, Halidou Adamou ABDOUL-KADER, Mounkaila Djibo ABDOULAZIZ
• Edit Aminatou ECHARD, NOH Young Sun
• Music Kapitan ZOUL

Survivance | Carine CHICHKOWSKY | c.chichko@gmail.com