Alain Gomis crafts a three-hour, cross-continental portrait of family life that merges myth, memory and improvised performance to examine what it means to belong to a diaspora.
Alain Gomis’s film Dao examines belonging through two contrasting ceremonies: a burial in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in France. The director rejects tidy categorization and constructs a cinematic rhythm that moves between ritual and everyday life.
Rather than offering a conventional plot, Gomis stages sequences that blur staged drama and observational record. The film interrogates diaspora, lineage and the tension between homeland and adopted country. Scenes feel both intimately lived-in and formally composed, inviting sustained attention to gesture, sound and seasonal detail.
Dao positions personal mourning and communal celebration side by side to probe how identity endures and adapts across borders. The film’s measured pacing and compositional choices foreground questions about memory, obligation and cultural transmission.
The film announces its hybrid intentions in its opening minutes. Casting sessions appear onscreen. Actors are introduced by the director and allowed to inhabit versions of themselves. This self-reflexive approach places questions of authenticity and artifice at the centre of the work. The camera repeatedly asks whether we witness a reenactment of memory, an act of collective imagination, or straightforward documentation.
Dao arranges episodes in a loop rather than a line. Scenes circulate between ceremony and domestic life, creating echoes that refract meaning. Rituals recur with slight variations, so each repetition both clarifies and complicates what came before. The effect is cumulative: small differences accrue until a familiar gesture acquires new resonance.
The film blends staged moments and observational sequences. Intimate family scenes often feel choreographed, while communal rites retain documentary immediacy. That tension is not accidental. Gomis uses it to interrogate how memories persist and how obligations are passed across generations.
Visually, Dao favors composed, steady frames that allow gestures to register. Long takes give performers room to shift between performance and being. The result is a film that resists easy classification. It asks viewers to weigh evidence rather than supply answers, keeping questions of memory, obligation and cultural transmission at the foreground.
Building on the film’s opening claim that viewers must weigh evidence rather than receive answers, the next section examines how performance and casting blur documentary and fiction. Director Gomis stages casting sessions on screen. These sequences frame acting as a communal act, not a private craft.
The film treats gatherings as sites of negotiation. Non-professional performers and staged interactions create a porous border between lived experience and representational form. Scenes that resemble vérité dialogue sit beside formally scripted moments, and the shift is never fully marked.
This technique reinforces the film’s central metaphor of a perpetual circular movement. Rituals of mourning and celebration are edited to converse. A funeral in a rural setting dissolves into a European wedding breakfast, then returns. The alternation makes rituals work like mechanisms of repair and identity formation across distance.
Performance here is political as well as aesthetic. By foregrounding casting and communal rehearsal, the film questions who has authority to narrate memory and obligation. It asks how cultural transmission survives migration and how families reconstruct continuity through shared enactment.
Building on the film’s inquiry into cultural transmission, Dao uses casting and performance to probe how memory and ritual are rehearsed across generations. He stages auditions within the film and describes his aim as assembling “a real fake family.”
The cast mixes non-professional participants and trained actors. Katy Correa plays Gloria, a mother whose still, observational presence resembles documentary portraiture. D’Johé Kouadio appears as Nour, a younger relative whose wedding becomes a narrative focal point.
Dao avoids a clear hierarchy between veterans and newcomers. The film cultivates a productive friction when everyday gestures enter the frame and staged moments acquire a lived quality. The camera often lingers on small looks, pauses and offhand movements that read as improvised. That lingering produces an immediacy that feels both intimate and credible.
That lingering produces an immediacy that feels both intimate and credible. The film’s visual language intensifies that effect. With three cinematographers sharing duties, including Céline Bozon, Dao adopts a handheld, skin-close perspective that repeatedly pushes the lens into the bodies and faces of participants. This approach creates what critics have called an epidermic intimacy. Viewers are positioned so near to the characters that the film registers as tactile, almost audible in its breathing. The camera’s urgency is matched by a layered soundscape that blends traditional music with contemporary tracks. The score forges auditory connections between the continents represented onscreen, reinforcing the film’s thematic concerns.
The film frames memory as a communal practice rather than a private archive. Scenes of rehearsed performance and everyday exchange show how recollection is transmitted through bodies, gestures and song. Return appears not as a single event but as a repeated social process. Characters revisit places and rituals, testing what endures and what adapts.
Rituals function as living repositories of identity. The film stages ceremonies, informal gatherings and auditions to reveal how rites are taught, altered and sometimes contested. These moments demonstrate the social life of ritual: they are sites of negotiation between past obligations and present realities. Through close observation, the film traces how memory and return shape belonging across generations and geographies.
Through close observation, the film traces how memory and return shape belonging across generations and geographies. It treats funerals and weddings as social laboratories where histories are recited, claims are tested and alliances are renegotiated. Conversations range from childhood recollections to debates over contemporary social questions. The gatherings stage the full range of family life: argument, reconciliation, food, sacrifice and song. They also permit the sudden arrival of figures who exercise ancestral authority.
The director resists melodrama. Even in moments of pronounced sorrow, the tone often tilts toward conviviality and resilience. That restraint allows the film to examine deracination—the sense of being uprooted—without reducing characters to mere symptoms of exile. The effect is portraiture by listening: a sequence of attentive scenes that assemble identity through speech, gesture and ceremony.
The effect continues as a study of attention rather than conventional plot. Quiet interactions accumulate into a broader account of social life. Each exchange—an older relative’s tentative advance, a ritual moment of possession at a wake—functions as evidence rather than spectacle.
Gloria serves as the film’s observational anchor. She connects memory to present action and guides younger family members through layered social terrain. These scenes operate as micro-institutions: they reveal how norms, obligations and affections are negotiated across generations. The result is a cumulative portrait assembled through listening, gesture and shared ritual.
The result is a cumulative portrait assembled through listening, gesture and shared ritual. At three hours, Dao deliberately allows its momentum to ebb and flow; those pauses form part of its architecture.
The film does not seek to resolve the mixed feelings of diasporic life. Instead it provides a capacious space where competing memories, loyalties and pleasures coexist. By blending documentary procedures with narrative invention, director Alain Gomis offers an expansive meditation on how families construct meaning across oceans and time. The work relies on patient, tactile cinematic craft that rewards sustained attention.