Juste un Mouvement at Pour la Suite du Monde

Vincent Meessen’s Juste un Mouvement is part of Pour la Suite du Monde film festival, Lyon
30/09/2025, 20:30h

“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.

The screening will be followed by a video discussion with Florian Bobin, historian (Cheikh-Anta-Diop University, Dakar) and author of Cette si longue quête. Vie et mort d’Omar Blondin Diop (This Long Quest: The Life and Death of Omar Blondin Diop), published by Jimsaan, 2024.