30.01.24, 20:30, S'en Fout la Mort

Following her debut Chocolat (1988), Claire Denis returns to the post-colonial excesses of contemporary France with this doom-laced film poem. Set in the illegal cockfighting milieu, Denis focuses her lens on two migrants who turn poultry into feathered killers in the basement of a local restaurant. The mild-mannered Dah (played with soulful beauty by Isaach De Bankolé) and the demure Jocelyn see cockfighting as a way of making a living, but soon find themselves caught in a vortex of deceit and disillusionment.

As usual, Denis lacks the moralising of characters and lets simple psychological explanations fly for a nuanced portrait of man and environment. Inspired by the writings of Frantz Fanon, she began the search for a new visual language to understand the colonial legacy of Western Europe. The result is a brooding descent into the night where precarious lives can nevertheless find rapprochement despite their world of violence and pain.