Juste un mouvement

In photos of Paris from the late 1960s, he can be seen in the crowd, not far from Daniel Cohn-Bendit. In Nanterre, he’s a philosophy student and activist. He would rather read Foucault than Mao’s Little Red Book, which doesn’t prevent Jean-Luc Godard from giving him the role of a Mao exegete in La chinoise. Just as Omar Blondin Diop’s brief life played out across several different levels, Vincent Meessen also layers the materials that make up Juste un mouvement. Shot/reverse shot stitches together past and present; Paris, Dakar and Peking provide the geographical framework; Godard’s signature colours of red and blue, the re-enactment of scenes from La chinoise and Chinese “soft-power” endeavours in contemporary Senegal are all smoothly folded into the mix. The uppermost level of the film, though, is dialectic of the most sinister sort: Léopold Sédar Senghor, of all people, poet and president of the independent Senegal, proponent of Négritude, persecutes his political enemies. In 1973, Diop dies at an outrageously young age, in the Gorée prison off the coast of Senegal. This moving film understands the stagnation that results when the promise of freedom tips over into repression. (Berlinale)