16/11/2022
Just a Movement (2021)
108 min | France, Belgium | French, Wolof and Mandarin with English subtitles
Director: Vincent Meessen
Just a Movement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard film shot in 1967 in Paris. Reallocating its roles and characters 50 years later in Dakar and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original film, now becomes the key character. Shot exclusively with amateur actors, including Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, the actors perform as themselves: a filmmaker, a rapper, a poet, a Chinese worker, a Shaolin master, a Senegalese intellectual, the Minister of Culture of Senegal and the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China.
“Omar is dead!” a voice cried out in Dakar on 11 May 1973. The eldest of the Blondin Diop family, a young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime. A phantom haunts the Senegalese capital, itself in a state of unrest.
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23/11/2022
Before the Dying of the Light (2020)
70 min | Morocco, France | Arabic with English subtitles
Director: Ali Essafi
This glittering collage of posters, magazine covers, archive footage, jazz music and cartoons takes the viewer back to the art scene of 1970s Morocco, viewed from the perspective of the artists and actors themselves. Many of them were to end up in prison or disappear without a trace.
The story revolves around a Moroccan independent film by Mostafa Derkaoui, About Some Meaningless Events (1974), where a group of young filmmakers explored the role the new Moroccan cinema should play in society. The counterculture arose from Marxist student movements which saw cinema as an “instrument for sensitization” and self-discovery. After just a single public screening, however, About Some Meaningless Events was censored by the government. The negatives of this long-lost film, however, were rediscovered in Spain and have recently been restored.
Dedicated to the victims of censorship and oppression, Before the Dying of the Light employs riotously edited fragments and evokes a time of excitement about the future, before it was extinguished by the repressive years under King Hassan II. Now that flame is briefly rekindled as these images are once again shown.