Juste un Mouvement
Screening of Vincent Meessen’s Juste un Mouvement at Decolonial Film Festival at Luxy Cinéma, Ivry (Paris region)
24/05/2025, 14:30h
~ program Résistances
~ curated and presented by Débordements
‘Just a Movement’ is a free adaptation of ‘La Chinoise’, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in Paris in 1967. Restaging 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 no longer alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only truly Maoist student in the original film, now becomes the key character. Shot exclusively with non-professional actors and including Omar Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, everyone in this film plays their own role : a filmmaker, a rapper, a poet, a Chinese worker, a Shaolin master, a famous Senegalese intellectual, Senegal’s Minister of Culture and even the Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China.
Vincent Meessen’s film reveals all this little by little, supported by archive footage, extracts from Godard’s film, and the testimonies of those who loved this young man and fought alongside him. But the film is not just a biography with interviews and archive footage, a kind of memorial film, or even a monument to the dead. In fact, it is the exact opposite, because for the filmmaker, telling this story serves above all to re-assess its current political potential. And as always, Vincent Meessen’s aim, in both form and content, is to create a dialogue between all the elements: past and present, cinema and reality, art and politics, fiction and documentary, stories and history, and to set them in tension. In this way, his distinctive method gives rise to a polysemous narrative that opens wide the doors of ideas, bridges various thoughts, upsets the linearity of historiographical narratives and shifts the point of view. In this way, the political dialectic is intelligently portrayed, shared and played out – not in a cold, theoretical way, but always alive, always in motion.~ Cinergie.be
Tickets on the Luxy website ~ 3,50€