Dao

RED3.5

Afriquement vôtre.Je ne savais rien de ce projet avant de le lancer et je me suis complètement laissé bercer par ce très beau portrait d’une Afrique vivante qui n’oublie pas son passé, son héritage et qui avance fièrement avec sa jeune génération pleine de promesses. Ici, pas de faux-semblants, tout est nature. Des dialogues aux différents décors, on est dans la vraie vie, c’est une proposition des plus sincères. Le spectateur est un invité et participe aux célébrations et aux enjeux présentés. Qu’il célèbre la vie, l’union ou la mort, Alain Gomis fait de Dao un heureux souffle panafricain que l’on prend plaisir à voir, entendre et ressentir. Authentique, festif et enrichissant. « On se promet la vie de l’autre. »

shookone2.0

if not for the big names, this would have been a good entry for the Forum section, in its experimental playfulness. apart from that you can always sell a film like this as lively (overly self-conscious) ethno arthouse and people will accept it as reasonable piece of the festival, but the fact that there was walkouts by the hundreds during the official premiere with the film team present (and not only the press screening where this is common practice & usually reported on as little scandal already) might be politely pointing towards something went terribly wrong. one thing you have to deal with when making a 3hrs mammoth, which - if you intend it or not - is always a massively pretentious statement & a promise hard to redeem.

Patrick W5.0

As if Ousmane Sembène and Robert Altman had gotten together to direct The Marriage of Figaro - all bustle and bodies, music and mischief, but with the air thickened by history.But jokes aside. This is modern cinema because it is free cinema. Free in the way it looks at family and at life, at arrival and origin, at birth and trance. It doesn’t pin its characters down like specimens; it lets them drift, collide, contradict themselves. The camera doesn’t explain them. It lives among them.I could write for hours about these bodies about the choreography of shoulders in doorways, about Gloria’s sorrowful, fathomless eyes that seem to carry three generations of departures. We could linger on the way the film watches skin, breath, silence. But that wouldn’t quite be the point.DAO is not an ethnographic gaze, and it is not a social-realist lesson dressed up as virtue. It refuses the tidy conscience of the issue-movie. Instead, it reimagines family as something unstable and alive: a network made of migration and memory, of loss and transmission. Family here is not a biological certainty but a fragile construction in motion.And from that motion comes the film’s quiet, consoling revelation: family is not forged by bloodline, but by the courage to begin again with one another.That’s the kind of discovery I go to the movies for.