Just a Movement
UnionDocs and E-Flux are thrilled to team up for a special co-presentation of Vincent Meessen’s Just a Movement , his critical repositioning of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise that reframes revolutionary cinema across time and perspective. At UnionDocs, New York
29/03/2026, 19:30h
Shot in 1967 in Paris, Godard’s original film follows a group of French students who embrace revolutionary ideals and eventually turn to violence. 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.
Made 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.
Just a Movement seeks out the countershots and off-screen spaces of the Western political imagination, and unfolds through a narrative that unabashedly borrows and reworks existing commentary. Meessen stages a dynamic exchange between La Chinoise and contemporary Senegal, where present-day images echo and reverberate with the soundtrack of Godard’s film.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Vincent Meessen. We hope you’ll join UnionDocs and E-Flux for this first-ever collaboration and for a lively post-screening discussion.