Nine years after winning the Silver Bear for “Félicité,” French director Alain Gomis is returning to the Berlin International Film Festival with “DAO,” his most personal work yet — a three-hour family saga set between France and West Africa.
The helmer, who has Bissau-Guinean and Senegalese origins, wrote and directed the film which stars a mix of actors and newcomers, leading with Katy Correa and D’Johé Kouadio as a mother-and-daughter duo. The story follows them across two ceremonies, a wedding in Paris and funeral in Guinea-Bissau.
In his very first interview discussing the film, Gomis tells Variety that “DAO” did not emerge from a single idea but from a life experience.
The initial spark dates back to 2018, after attending his father’s funeral ceremony in Guinea-Bissau, which was a powerful experience for him. “I remember thinking: I’d like to make a film out of this. I didn’t know how,” he says. “It’s a film made of small things you add together, that weave into a mosaic. It grew in size and volume through tiny details.”
Shot in just 20 days — 10 in France and 10 in Guinea-Bissau — the production was swift, unlike the process. True to Gomis’ method, almost none of the dialogue was scripted in advance, with scenes shaped in the present tense during the shooting which took place on location, between France and a village in Guinea-Bissau. “It’s the intentions that matter. What is happening inside the character at that moment? What’s at stake?” explains Gomis, who founded the Yennenga Centre, comprising cinema school, in Senegal back in 2018.
Ultimately, Gomis ended up with 200 hours of footage. “We had a five-hour film,” he says with a laugh. The editing process became an exercise in preservation: keeping what he calls “the real function of participation” – meaning the collective energy — while sculpting it into a three-hour narrative.
Improvisation proved central to his process and gave the film a sort of hybrid nature, blending fiction with bits of documentary. Non-professional Katy Correa, he says, possesses “an intelligence of performance,” instinctively grasping emotional stakes. Gomis also brought well-established actors, like Samir Guesmi and Thomas Ngijol, into the fold.
Although “DAO” is more intimate than political, Gomis sublty addresses timely themes, such as the impact of colonization, displacement and inherited trauma.
“Each family carries its secrets. Here, there’s something about people who were formed through an absence, whose image of themselves needs repairing,” he says. Referring to the generational gap between those who stayed in Africa, and those who emigrated, he explains that “some things weren’t explored, weren’t spoken. You grow up with the feeling that something is missing.”
As in “Felicité, which revolved around a bar singer in Kinshasa who embarks on a journey across the Congolese capital to raise money for her son’s surgery, the female perspective remains central in “DAO.”
In “DAO,” Corréa plays a single mother who is marrying her daughter and starts reconsidering her own future. Gomis says he was inspired to explore “DAO”‘s story from a female perspective and tackle once again motherhood.
He says the film “first came to me through a female character,” because that’s “something I’ve seen in our families — women who refused themselves another life before their child was grown — as if they didn’t have the right to think about themselves first.”
Like these women he’s known, the character played by Corréa has “postponed another life for herself until her child was older,” says Gomis.
Another similarity with Gomis’ previous work, such as “Felicity” and “Rewind & Play,” music, and particularly jazz, provided the tonal backbone for “DAO.” The score alternates between traditional ceremonial sounds and some jazz pieces by saxophonist Keïta Janota and Gaspard Gomis which frame the narration.
“It gave the film its flesh,” he says. “There’s something tender, nostalgic. A beautiful way of looking at the world.”
Set to premiere in competition on Feb. 14, “DAO” is a France-Senegal-Guinea-Bissau co-production with celebrated producer Sylvie Pialat at Les Films du Worso (“Timbuktu”) and SRAB Films (“Les Miserables”), alongside Senegalese co-producers Yennenga Productions and Nafi Films, and Telecine Bissau Produções in Guinea-Bissau. The Party Film Sales is representing the film internationally.