One night many years ago, a French family was driving through the North Region of Cameroon when they ran out of gas. As they scrambled to refill the tank, the car was surrounded by a pride of lions.
To protect their young daughter, the parents locked her in a metal trunk. The animals circled the vehicle continuously, and to distract herself from danger the girl repeated her own name. Over the years, the story of the little blond French girl besieged by lions became something of a legend in the area. It was said by some that she had survived for fifteen days under the hot African sun.
Decades after the story first circulated, the little girl returned to Cameroon from Paris, where she had come of age. She was still small, and her hair remained blond, but she was now in her sixties.
She had become a director and was there to work on a feature film. Sometimes, when scouting locations in the bush with her camera-laden crew, she would come upon locals and introduce herself. She rolled her hips from side to side. The dialogue is sparse, and the cast of characters is limited. The themes are there, too: the refusal of victimhood, the embrace of solitude amid chaos, and race as an unremarked on but glaring element of a situation that is easy to imagine but impossible to fully explain.
Like water, it finds its way into even the most hidden interpersonal crevices, which no amount of good will or innocence or even love can caulk. In almost every shot, Denis acknowledges the cultivated ignorance and cruel indifference of whiteness. This is a first movie by someone who has not one question about what her rights are as a storyteller.
