Dir/scr: Philippe Lacote. France/Ivory Coast/Canada/Senegal. 2020. 93 minutes.
In a infamous jail deep within the Ivory Coast jungle, a male Scheherazade spins tales on the night time of a pink moon whereas an influence wrestle between inmates threatens to erupt into violence. Philippe Lacote’s second dramatic characteristic after his 2014 Cannes debut Run is a wealthy, unusual creature, an African movie during which the MACA jail, with its guidelines and rituals, is reimagined as a microcosm of Ivorian society, politics, historical past and tradition, and a movie whose director turns into a sort of choreographer of underground energies and buried narratives.
An atmospherically shot movie about African oral tradition
Premiering in Venice’s Horizons part, the movie shares sure themes and strategies with Mati Diop’s critically-acclaimed Atlantics, not solely in the best way it harnesses the supernatural within the service of a movie about an African society’s current-day issues and contours of fracture. Also tapped by the Toronto and New York selectors, Night Of The Kings could not break via to that title’s status streaming success however is probably going, on the very least, to be embraced by programmers on the lookout for evocative world cinema content material.
In Night Of The Kings, an otherworldy temper is there from the onset, as an aerial shot flies over of miles of jungle and cuts to the military van which is bringing a younger convict to serve his time in MACA. Surrounded by a sea of inexperienced, this brutalist concrete compound appears dislocated from the world, in a special time and house – a way strengthened by Olivier Alary’s eerie soundtrack of screeching, plaintive violin and sax notes, backed by distant jungle noises.
We already know, because of a gap caption, that “MACA is a prison with its own codes and laws”, dominated over not by its guards however by the Dangoro, “supreme chief” among the many prisoners, who should take his personal life when he falls in poor health and might now not govern. That’s precisely what’s occurring, we realise, as we meet the present Dangoro, a weathered hulk referred to as Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu), who’s dying from some unspecified illness and seeing his authority challenged by the cocky Lass (Abdul Karim Konate) and his gang. Blackbeard is aware of nevertheless that he can purchase time by invoking an previous jail ritual whereby, on the night time of a pink moon, a storyteller is chosen from among the many inmates and instructed to spin tales.
It’s the terrified new arrival who’s chosen by Blackbeard to develop into Roman (‘novel’ in French), the title historically given to the pink moon storyteller – whose destiny, when he finishes his story, is, we quickly realise, fairly just like that which awaited the well-known Arabian Nights princess. As the night time of the pink moon approaches, we and Roman meet a few of the different denizens of MACA, who appear to have the run of a spot which the jail guards by no means enter, merely observing the motion via concrete slits. They have names like Razor Blade and Half Mad; the one white man right here is Silence, a cracked weirdo performed by each French director’s go-to cracked weirdo actor, Denis Lavant.
The jail courtyard, lit by candles and flickering oil lamps, turns into the stage for many of the second half of the movie as Roman begins to inform a narrative, hesistantly at first, a couple of younger crime boss and political hustler referred to as Zama King. Scenes from the story are performed out in two methods – first by a few of the assembled jail viewers, within the type of mime, dance, name-and-response, and a capella improvised songs – and secondly in filmed scenes that dramatise Roman’s narrative. As he backtracks in time to the delivery of Zama, we all of a sudden discover ourselves in a legendary Ivorian coastal kingdom the place the military of a proud queen with supernatural powers is pitted in opposition to that of her youthful brother.
This is an atmospherically shot movie about African oral tradition, about riots, avenue musicians and storytellers. But it additionally makes use of the house and denizens of the jail as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions inside Ivorian society, embedding its factionalism in a extremely ritualised combat between two teams of prisoners, and utilizing Roman’s interrupted, again-to-entrance story (he begins on the finish earlier than going again) as a mirror for the various hiatuses and backward slides within the nation’s current political historical past.
Production firm: Banshee Films
International gross sales: Memento Films International, gross sales@mementofilms.com
Producers: Delphine Jaquet, Yanick Létourneau, Ernest Konan, Yoro Mbaye
Production design: Samuel Teisseire
Editing: Aube Foglia
Cinematography: Tobie Marier Robitaille
Music: Olivier Alary
Main forged: Kone Bakary, Steve Tientcheu, Rasmane Ouedraogo, Issaka Sawadogo, Digbeu Jean Cyrille, Abdul Karim Konate, Anzian Marcel, Laetitia Ky, Vero Tshanda Beya, Denis Lavant
