Dao Showcase
Tickets
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About
A series of Black French women sit before the camera, answering questions about identity, history, and character — both real and fictive. From this intimate starting point, Dao embarks on a multidirectional journey, sweeping the viewer along through two cultural events featuring Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) and her mother Gloria (Katy Correa): a mourning ceremony in Guinea-Bissau, and a wedding in France. Nour is the French bride, whose rites in Guinea-Bissau mark her first visit to the village of her ancestors.
Director Alain Gomis is equally adept at artifice and realism: he directs professional and non-professional actors so skillfully that the line between being and performing becomes blurred, if not invisible. The mourning ceremony, with its mixture of strict ritual and wild abandon, is a vehicle for catharsis and tribute; the wedding, while more familiar in its outlines, is full of fascinating cultural inflections. Artifice and reality, tradition and modernity, race and gender — they make for an intoxicating mix in this joyful evocation of life.
Director Alain Gomis is equally adept at artifice and realism: he directs professional and non-professional actors so skillfully that the line between being and performing becomes blurred, if not invisible. The mourning ceremony, with its mixture of strict ritual and wild abandon, is a vehicle for catharsis and tribute; the wedding, while more familiar in its outlines, is full of fascinating cultural inflections. Artifice and reality, tradition and modernity, race and gender — they make for an intoxicating mix in this joyful evocation of life.
