DAO

Grief is praise, writes spiritual thinker Martín Prechtel in The Smell of Rain on Dust, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses. Both expressions merge into one another in Dao, named after the concept of a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world. In the spirit of this, the film blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, Africa and Europe, and the past and the future, to interweave two kinds of ceremony: an elaborate memorial service in a village in Guinea-Bissau and a grand wedding in the French countryside. At the heart of this family saga is Gloria. She is the daughter of the deceased and the mother of the bride. Together with her, you share emotions and memories, sacrifices and other rituals, dancing, laughter, singing and countless embraces, but also heated conversations and tensions.

Musically, the film’s heartbeat resonates through traditional ceremonial pieces and tender jazz – an element that was already of vital importance to director Alain Gomis in Rewind & Play (FFG2022). You’ll hear both new work by (his cousin) Gaspard Gomis and the young saxophonist Keïta Janota, as well as existing tracks by the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who passed away in June. Just like Silver Bear winner Félicité (2017), Dao came to the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker from a female perspective. Through Gloria and her family, he once again explores the impact of colonisation, displacement and trauma across generations, with a focus on representation.

Dao is Gomis’s most personal project to date. After attending his father’s funeral in Guinea-Bissau in 2018, he sought to create something new out of that profound experience. Some two years later, he found the answer at a wedding. Gomis drew inspiration from life itself, collective energy and participation, working with a mix of non-professional and professional actors. Authentic, small moments born of improvisation grew into an intimate yet monumental mosaic. Twenty days of filming, divided equally between the two continents, yielded two hundred hours of footage, from which Gomis and his team of editors crafted a three-hour film. After all, it takes time to truly celebrate both sorrow and joy.