Directed by: Alain Gomis
Distributed by: Janus Films
Written by Eric Zhu
90/100
Even as a huge fan of Alain Gomis’ last film, the mid-length Thelonious Monk documentary “Rewind and Play,” nothing could have prepared me for the magnificence of his follow-up, “Dao,” which is undeniably one of the year’s very best films and should be some kind of modern classic when it comes to making films about diaspora.
Though “Dao” won’t stick to their perspective, our way into the film is through a mother, Gloria, and her daughter, Nour. The majority of the film cuts between two ceremonies, one, a funeral for Gloria’s father in an African village, and the other, Nour’s wedding, a year later. The film opens in more of an individualist mode. We see the village through the eyes of the daughter, who’s never been there before, and the wedding through the mother, who never had one of her own. Eventually, the festivities commence, and introductions give way to a sustained torrent of color, movement, and sound. It’s a three-hour act of celebration and commemoration. While the individuality of each event asserts itself in particular moments, such as the funeral’s animal sacrifice or a soccer game at the wedding venue, both are seamlessly incorporated back into the family organism.
By cutting between the two events, Gomis has found a formal corollary to the diasporic experience, allowing the annoyingly-sloganized feeling of being caught between two cultures at once to emerge naturally, without any value judgment or declarative statements. He not only places two cultures side by side, but depicts them as a contiguous experience, treating the generational transference in what’s inherited and what’s lost as something intangible. The question of assimilation has been top of mind for many directors, and “Dao” is one of the best about the nuances of what it means to try to integrate within a foreign culture.
While many American films turn the immigrant experience into a recombination of narrative tropes and stereotypes, almost like a reinforcement of the status quo. Gomis avoids this by deviating from a hero narrative. “Dao” is a film with a true communal perspective. The most striking choice in this regard is his inclusion of the actors’ audition footage. He intercuts the musical tapestry with interviews where the cast, a mix of professionals and non-professionals (some of whom are Gomis’ actual relatives) describe the characters they’d like to play and aspects of their personal history. In doing so, Gomis foregrounds the film’s naturalist simulacra, turning attention away from any concrete ethnographic lessons we expect from films by auteurs from the global south. Instead, he directs audiences towards the film’s sensory cadences, textures which include the extra-textual personal histories involved in the film’s creation. This only expands upon the film’s emotional power, which draws heavily from the way Gomis unites a family separated across time and space. For three short hours, the evanescence of Gomis’ liberated form invites all of us into his community’s “real fake family.”
“Dao” Trailer
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