"I don’t know whether people will read it as you want to present it: powerful, extraordinary, strange." Echoing, from afar, the testimony of one of the many characters in his new film, the meteorite Dao [+lee también:
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entrevista: Alain Gomis
ficha de la película] (defined as a “perpetual circular movement giving structure to reality”), unveiled in competition at the 76th Berlinale, Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis embarks on a cinematic challenge of immense ambition: to transcend and erase the boundaries between documentary and fiction, to build bridges between continents, between the past of the ancestors and the present of their descendants, between spirits and prosaic nature, in order to bring forth a human truth filled with colour, music and joy. It is a vast programme that the director carries through successfully, maintaining control over his life-filled work of art, stretching time and pursuing non-narrative pathways rich in extremely subtle resonances, all under the guise of candid footage.

Interspersed with numerous casting sessions during which the underlying subject gradually emerges (the journey of the second generation of African immigrants in France, the place of women, the complex transmission of ancestral values to the next young generation), the film unfolds around a slender guiding thread embodied by a mother-daughter duo: Gloria (Katy Correa) and Nour (D’Johé Kouadio), observational pivots of the “true-false family” reconstituted by the filmmaker. A large community within which the “narrative” immerses itself, moving back and forth between Guinea-Bissau for a (simulated) multi-day ceremony in the village of Cacheu honouring the memory of Gloria’s father (who died two years earlier) and the Paris suburbs for the exuberantly festive wedding of Nour and James (Mike Etienne).

Family, with its intense emotional ties, shared memories and tensions, ancestral roots, memory (individual, but also of colonisation, slavery and armed struggles for independence), current and past loves (with Samir Guesmi in the role of Gloria's ex), children's games, dances, sacrifices, collective singing (from traditional chants and percussion to Kill Me Softly With His Song by the Fugees), reunions, friction (over managing the money from contributions), hugs, sidelong glances, little aside conversations, prayers, etc.: the film weaves together a captivating array of encounters, rituals of all kinds and small moments intertwined in a larger whole. A masterful piece of editing, accompanied by omnipresent music (by Abdullah Ibrahim, Gaspard Gomis & Space Dukes, Keita Janota & Cie).

Designed as a flow that closely mirrors the rhythm of life, Dao lets time do its work to get as close as possible to the human experience. Some may find the tempo a little too drawn out at times, but the filmmaker fully embraces his decision to orchestrate, as in jazz, small, very free variations around a melodic line. He presents a work of remarkable maturity, a personal artistic expression of the highest order, drawing on a communal source to achieve a universal dimension ("we don't always have to essentialise everyone"), that of life, a time when ordinary people are the stars.

Dao was produced by French companies Les Films du Worso and SRAB Film, and co-produced by Senegalese companies Yennenga Productions and Nafi Productions, and by Telecine Bissau Produçoes (Guinea-Bissau). The Party Film Sales handles international sales.