a thoughtful review of alain gomis’s dao, presented at berlinale, focusing on its themes of diaspora, family dynamics, and cinematic craft (published: 15/02/2026 18:35).
Dao opened at the Berlinale with a quietly ambitious sweep: intimate family moments braided into a broader, diasporic geography. Alain Gomis’s film follows a family as it moves—between countries, languages and generations—leaving traces of memory that never quite settle. Rather than offering tidy explanations, Dao prefers repetition, textures and small gestures that gradually reveal what migration does to belonging.
Narrative architecture and thematic core
Gomis assembles the film as a mosaic of converging vignettes. Time folds back on itself, scenes recur in different languages and tones, and chronology gives way to rhythms of rupture and return. These choices aren’t merely stylistic; they’re the film’s argument. Displacement here isn’t a single event but an ongoing condition: identity is porous, memory is layered, and allegiance keeps shifting.
Many scenes unfold in transitional spaces—airport lounges, temporary rooms, kitchen tables—places where people are neither fully here nor entirely elsewhere. Those settings become expressive anchors for the film’s mood of in-betweenness. Rather than treating migration as a headline, Dao studies its domestic residue: shared meals, repeated gestures, half-finished sentences that carry family histories.
Visual style and directorial choices
Visually, Gomis favors restraint. The camera lingers on faces and hands; close-ups and long takes let small movements accrue meaning. Warm, domestic lighting often softens interiors, while bleached exteriors punctuate moments of exposure. Editing is elliptical, braiding past and present so that scenes feel like echoes rather than explanations. These formal choices allow the viewer to inhabit emotional states instead of being told what to feel.
There’s a deliberate economy to the imagery: minimal camera movement, natural light, a muted palette that privileges texture over spectacle. This aesthetic decision pushes small details—an old recipe, the creak of a chair, the way someone pauses mid-sentence—into the foreground, letting them function as mnemonic anchors.
Performances and intimate moments
The acting is quietly exact. Rather than grand statements, actors inhabit microgestures: a brief glance, a tightened jaw, a measured silence. Rituals—meals, funerals, domestic routines—repeat throughout the film, turning ordinary moments into repositories of memory and belonging. These repeated scenes build a sense of continuity even as characters are constantly negotiating new places and languages.
Gomis casts performers who can make silence speak. The ensemble chemistry is credible and granular: each character carries private histories and conflicting desires, but the group also feels like a living family, with recurring gestures forming a kind of spoken archive.
Sound and acoustic design
Sound plays a functional, often persuasive role in Dao. Ambient noises—kitchen clatter, distant traffic, a radio hum—are mixed close to the foreground, creating an acoustic intimacy that mirrors the visual restraint. Dialogue is textured; languages collide and overlap without being smoothed over for the audience. Music is sparse and strategic, used to punctuate rather than manipulate emotion. Together, these choices form an aural field where ordinary sound becomes narrative substance.
Themes: diaspora, memory and reconciliation
Rather than flattening diaspora into a didactic subject, Dao treats it as a domestic, evolving condition. Memory arrives in fragments—objects, recipes, idioms, and gestures—rather than in declarative backstories. Reconciliation isn’t a climactic scene but a long negotiation, an accrual of small, shared acts that keep family ties alive across distance. The film asks how culture and continuity are transmitted when geography keeps shifting: who carries the past, and how does it change in new contexts?
Where Dao fits in contemporary cinema
Dao sits within a noticeable trend in recent films that favor quiet precision and observational intimacy over spectacle. Filmmakers increasingly use sensory detail—sound textures, restrained performances, careful composition—to render complex identities. Gomis’s film exemplifies how formal simplicity can open space for interpretation: by refusing to spell everything out, it invites viewers to assemble meaning from repetition and resonance.
Narrative architecture and thematic core
Gomis assembles the film as a mosaic of converging vignettes. Time folds back on itself, scenes recur in different languages and tones, and chronology gives way to rhythms of rupture and return. These choices aren’t merely stylistic; they’re the film’s argument. Displacement here isn’t a single event but an ongoing condition: identity is porous, memory is layered, and allegiance keeps shifting.0
Narrative architecture and thematic core
Gomis assembles the film as a mosaic of converging vignettes. Time folds back on itself, scenes recur in different languages and tones, and chronology gives way to rhythms of rupture and return. These choices aren’t merely stylistic; they’re the film’s argument. Displacement here isn’t a single event but an ongoing condition: identity is porous, memory is layered, and allegiance keeps shifting.1
Narrative architecture and thematic core
Gomis assembles the film as a mosaic of converging vignettes. Time folds back on itself, scenes recur in different languages and tones, and chronology gives way to rhythms of rupture and return. These choices aren’t merely stylistic; they’re the film’s argument. Displacement here isn’t a single event but an ongoing condition: identity is porous, memory is layered, and allegiance keeps shifting.2