The 76th Berlin International Film Festival’s main competition featured Alain Gomis’ most recent film, DAO, which is a mix of documentary and fiction that tells a story about family, heritage, and ritual. The movie follows Gloria (Katy Correa) and her daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) through two important events: Nour’s joyful wedding in the suburbs of Paris and a multi-day memorial service in Guinea-Bissau’s Cacheu village for Gloria’s late father. This never-ending circular movement, which is what the movie’s title means, brings together joy, pain, memory, and rebirth between France and Africa.
Gomis puts together a “true-false family” with both professional and amateur actors, capturing real-life tensions, dances, chants, and conversations that are similar to what immigrants go through and pass down to their children. Interspersed casting sessions show themes of the second generation of Africans living in France, women’s roles, and colonial history. These themes are skillfully woven together with music by Abdullah Ibrahim and others. Critics call it an amazing, non-narrative flow that mirrors the rhythm of life and has subtle echoes that cross time and space.
Cineuropa calls DAO a “cinematic challenge of immense ambition” that is full of color, music, and universal human truth, though some people don’t like how slow it is on purpose. The Party Film Sales handles world sales for this France-Senegal-Guinea-Bissau co-production by Les Films du Worso, SRAB Films, and others. Gomis, who won the Silver Bear at Berlinale in 2017 for Félicité, uses real-life events to show how ordinary people can be stars in this mature, jazz-like art form.
