Just a Movement
Juste un mouvement
DIRECTED BY: Vincent Meessen COUNTRY: Belgium, France YEAR: 2021 SPOKEN LANGUAGE(S): French, Mandarin Chinese, Wolof SUBTITLES: English RUNNING TIME: 110 min
SECTION: International Forum
SCREENINGS
SYNOPSIS
«Omar is dead!», a voice cried out in Dakar, 11 May 1973. The eldest of the Blondin Diop family, a young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime. A phantom haunts the Senegalese capital, itself in a state of unrest.
Juste un Mouvement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in 1967 in Paris. Reallocating its roles and characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character.
Shot exclusively with non-professional actors and including Omar Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, everyone in this film performs themselves: a filmmaker, a rapper, a poet, a Chinese worker, a Shaolin master, a Senegalese intellectual, the Minister of Culture of Senegal and the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China.
BIOGRAPHY
Vincent Meessen was born in Baltimore, USA, in 1971, and lives and works in Brussels. His artistic work is woven from a constellation of actors, gestures, and signs that maintain a polemical and sensible relation to the writing of history and the westernization of imaginaries. He decenters and multiplies gazes and perspectives to explore the variety of ways in which colonial modernity has impacted the fabric of contemporary subjectivities. Both in his work as an artist and in his paracuratorial activities, he likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives. With ten guest artists, Meessen represented Belgium at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
FILMOGRAPHY
N12°13.062’/WOO1°32.619’Extended (2005), Les sociétaires (2006), The Invisible’s Parliament (2006), Made in Belgium (2007), Dear Advisor (2009), Vita Nova (2009), One.Two.Three (2015), Ultramarine (2018), Quelle que soit la longueur de la nuit (2020), Just a movement (2021)
SCRIPT: Vincent Meessen PRODUCER: Geneviève de Bauw, Vincent Meessen CINEMATOGRAPHY: Vincent Pinckaers EDITOR: Simon Arazi SCORE:CAST: Dialo Blondin Diop, Ousman Blondin Diop, Marie-Thérèse Diedhiou
WEBSITE: https://www.justeunmouvement.film/
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Thank You & Good Night Productions WORLD SALES: CBA – Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles (cba@skynet.be)
