At that first screening, there were gusts of laughter; joy on the faces lit by the film.

In a sequence that Rika thought he’d have cut, Don walks across the empty dance ground with his own tail of boys. A young man jives to music that’s coming from the house, and off to the side one of the chiefs watches with a face full of sorrow. Boja and Obi frown at the pages of a ragged notebook, old women run for cover as the rain begins and the mountains vanish from view. A woman with a folded bark-cloth on her knee and a half coconut shell of black paint is in shot; behind her, a cloth of painted mountains hangs from a wall and a small girl leans against her, dressed in a pattern of spiralling bush-snails. The old chiefs talk on their platform where the dancers hang their headdresses, and Nanaji asks questions about the intentions of the camera, as Obi and Boja struggle to translate the words of the chiefs. All this without an explanatory voiceover, only subtitles and Obi’s expressive eyes and his faltering translation.

In his closing thanks, Alex Penrose compared The Mountain to the shift that came to ethnographic film when Jean Rouch lost his tripod in Niger and discovered what could be done with the handheld camera. Twenty years later, Leonard had made a virtue of a different necessity. When unwelcome intrusions sabotaged his original intention to record the mountain culture with as little disturbance as possible in the presence of a camera, he had a choice. He could disregard the intrusions, leave them on the cutting-room floor, or he could let the experience change the film, and also him.

Five years tells the answer.

‘The decisive moment,’ he said at the next day’s workshop with Rika’s students. That is what the camera looks for. The decisive moment when something is present, illuminated as it comes into being, or as it vanishes. The look on a face. The moment of change, the dissonant note, the unexpected joke. You’ll find it where you do not expect to find it. Where you do not want to find it.

Rika was standing at the side of the studio, leaning against the wall, her face half turned from the class, towards Leonard. Outside the windows, people were splashing past with plastic over their heads. Inside, everyone was attentive, none of the usual lounging around, no side comments, no flirting; instead a leaning forward, and stillness. Village Shots was up, and Leonard moved from one exhibit to the next, speaking with a conviction that had those whose work it was standing perceptibly taller.

‘There, do you see? Those boys in the background. Do you notice their expression? What are they looking at? Not you, not the camera. We’re in a settlement, yes? What are we seeing? Poverty, an old man with no teeth. Lack of opportunity. Another man with a discarded tyre. Yes. It’s well composed. Are they resigned, these men? Making what they can from the scraps they pick up on the road. Yes? So, let’s return to the boys. What age would you say? Seventeen? Are they resigned? Are they without hope? No. They’re young, they’re going to make a future. Look at their faces. What expression do you get there? If these boys became the subject, what would we be seeing? The beginnings of the gangs?’