Film Africa x Afrika Eye: Dao

Dao is a perpetual circular movement framing reality.

In his most sprawling and ambitious film to date, French Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis (Félicité) has crafted a remarkable cinematic experience, an immersion into the rituals of one extended family, set across two continents.

Dao plunges headfirst into two separate yet intrinsically interconnected ceremonies — a memorial in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in Paris — which Gomis cuts between with kinetic abandon. Both are attended by the taciturn yet soulful middle-aged Gloria (Katy Correa), whose father has recently died and whose daughter, Nour (D’Johé Kouadio), is about to be married. Reaching ecstatic highs while also remaining grounded in the pragmatic details of the celebrations it depicts, Dao illustrates the power and persistence of African diaspora traditions.

Cast with both professional actors and amateur performers, including members of the director’s own family, Gomis’s epic unfolds as a tapestry being woven before our eyes, a constant flow of movement that delicately raises questions of ancestry and assimilation, life and death, and, in its surprising construction, fiction and documentary.

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