Directed by Alain Gomis
Senegal, France, Guinea-Bissau | 2026 | Fiction | 185 min | French, Wolof, Manjak, and Portuguese Creole w/ subtitles
Sponsored by Monika Jaeckle and Lou Slanina
Thursday, October 22 | 12:15 pm | FH
In his sprawling, wildly ambitious film, director Alain Gomis juggles three separate throughlines—a wedding in southern France, a funeral in rural Nigeria, and various people, either in-character or not, just talking to the camera. The story goes far and wide within its confines— and a 3-hour runtime to create a coherent, magical work of art. It plumbs the emotions from ecstatic joy to raw grief, though there's no real centrality to the plot, unless maybe it's the efforts of Gloria (Katy Correa, great) attempting to live a life in Europe while keeping roots in Africa. It's that rare, maybe even unique three-hour movie that feels longer, but in a good way—like you've gone to both the wedding and the funeral, and fully taken part in both rituals, and you're leaving the next morning, kinda woozy and hung over, a little bleary on some details, but very glad that you came. ~SM