Nous

A black man climbing a letter, setting up four French flags for some official holiday. An old white woman recalling former days, when she met her husband, an immigrant worker from Italy. A visit to the memorial site of the Drancy detention camp during the Nazi occupation. Glimpses from a home video back in the days when the mother of Alice Diop, director of this award-winning documentary at this year’s Berlinale, was still alive.
NOUS is a cautious, apparently unconstrained filmic inquiry led by the question of what holds a community together, a community that seems divided by many things. Inspired by the logbook “Les Passagers du Roissy-Express“ by French author François Maspero written 30 years ago, Diop roams the banlieues of Paris alongside the RER B city train. French history and private episodes, the ephemeral and the eternal, everything has a place.
The beauty of this roadtrip is the way it lets the images talk to us. NOUS is not a research project on the missing unity of a nation, but a claim to constitute what is called NOUS/WE by drawing lines between the protagonists of this area. The unseen is rendered visible, with Diop herself very much part of this. (Gunnar Landsgesell)

Alice Diop: LES SÉNÉGALAISES ET LA SÉNÉGAULOISE (2007), LA MORT DE DANTON (2011), VERS LA TENDRESSE (2016, K). LA PERMANENCE (2016), RER B (2017, K)