After years of writing screenplays for others - Julien Leclercq(Braqueurs, L'Assaut), Yann Gozlan(Burn Out, Boite Noire) - Simon Moutaïrou is stepping behind the camera with his first feature film, Ni Chaînes ni Maîtres, due in French cinemas on September 18, 2024.
1759. Isle de France - now Mauritius. Massamba(Ibrahima Mbaye Tchie) and Mati(Anna Thiandoum), slaves on Eugène Larcenet's(Benoit Magimel) plantation, live in fear and toil. He dreams of freeing his daughter, she of leaving the green hell of sugar cane. One night, she flees in search of a community of fugitive slaves who are said to live free in the wild, in the greatest secrecy.
At your own risk. From the very first minutes, the film takes stock of the punishments inflicted on those who dare to cross the boundaries of the property: lashes for a first attempt, ears and heels cut off for a second, death if the slave tries to sneak away a third time.
Madame La Victoire(Camille Cottin), a famous slave hunter, is hired to track down Mati, with the help of her two sons and under the aegis of God. Massamba has no choice but to escape. With this act, he becomes a "marron", a fugitive who breaks forever with thecolonial order. For his first film, the Franco-Beninese director tackles an important subject.
While Mati Diop's deeply moving Dahomey, his latest documentary which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, denounces the a posteriori impact of French colonization in Benin, Simon Moutaïrou chooses to illustrate this inhumanity as it happens, in a film that is necessary - especially in these troubled times - on the borderline between historical drama and adventure film.
Witha handheld camera, the director follows this manhunt in the tropics in the breathless manner of a survival film , interspersed with hallucinatory scenes under the totemic figure of Mami Wata. The hunt for the Black Man, the deserter who is too white for blacks, too black for whites - the character of Massamba, renamed Cicero by his masters, speaks both Wolof and French; he can also read and write.
Close to the Valladolid Controversy in terms of the questions raised by its subject, Ni Chaînes ni Maîtres questions the moral dilemma of violence versus resilience, even as allies become scarce - the character of Larcenet's son(Felix Lefebvre) thus embodies theopen-mindedness, ultimately quite modernist, of a generation of colonists in spite of themselves influenced by Enlightenment thinking, with no Manichaeism on Simon Moutaïrou's part.
D'une île(Pacifiction) à l'autre, Benoit Magimel plays this deceptively considerate plantation master, in reality convinced of the rightness of colonial slavery and the submission of the black man to the white economy. He will even torture or have someone torture him - some of the scenes of public punishment are very harsh - to better achieve his ends. And suddenly, the resistance that takes shape and spreads through the ranks, the struggle for survival and for a paradigm shift.
Ni Chaînes ni Maîtres lifts the veil, with all the violence, brutality and cruelty that implies, on this dark period inFrench colonial history, right up to a heartbreaking yet infinitely beautiful final scene. After all, it would be another few decades - 1794 - before France put an end to the slave trade. A great realistic film in the form of atribute to the resistance of a people.
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