Afbeelding
Een jongeman wordt naar La Maca verbannen, een gevangenis diep in het Ivoriaanse woud. Volgens traditie moet hij bij de eerste maansverduistering als nieuweling een nacht lang de andere gevangen vermaken met een verhaal. Wanneer ze niet tot zonsopgang aan zijn lippen hangen, moet hij het bekopen met de dood. Nerveus begint hij aan het verhaal van de legendarische bandiet Zama King.
Hoofdinhoud
‘Together with specific references to Ivory Coast’s civil war, Lacôte’s film uses elements of song and dance from a prisoner’s chorus. The result is a seemingly incongruous merging of reality and myth- but, Lacôte says, “ in Ivorian culture in particular and African culture generally, there’s no difference. In the West, the term is magic realism, but for us the frontier between living and dead, visible and invisible, realism and magic is practically non-existent- or at least, porous. I needed to tell this story from the point of view of the African imaginary.”’
Jonathan Romney in: Sight and Sound, Vol. 31, nr. 6, Summer 2021, p. 10
‘Lacôte’s use of the prisoners as a Greek chorus is mesmerising; at times they chant, sing and move as one organism. Men break off to perform Roman’s words in a combination of African dance and commedia dell’arte. Their ritualised combats take on a similarly surreal light: hyper-masculine posturing expressed through pirouettes and fluttering long limbs. As the gangs attack one another, they flock like starlings against the sky, surging forwards and taking blows as a single fluid entity.
Night of the Kings holds to a simple truth: that men need stories to interpret the world and make its cruelties bearable. The Ivorian cinematic tradition has been derailed in the recent past, following a coup d’état in 1999 and a series of civil wars until 2011. Lacôte’s film speaks to the country’s need to create stories, to make extraordinary films like this, that make sense of all they have endured.’Leila Latif in: Sight and Sound, Vol. 31, nr. 6, Summer 2021, p. 118
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