DAO

DAO is a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world.”–Thus begins Alain Gomis’ latest offering, the director's second film to be nominated for a Golden Bear. It follows Gloria as she navigates family, memory, and inheritance across two enmeshed realities: a wedding in a Paris suburb and a mourning ritual in Guinea-Bissau. As preparations for her daughter’s marriage unfold, memories of her father’s recent funeral ceremony resurface, binding past and present. Blurring fiction and lived experience, the film weaves together individual stories, gestures, and rituals into a collective portrait of life in the diaspora. Subtle yet thrilling, Gomis underlines the perpetually turning cycles of life and death, celebration and grief that it is impossible to turn away from.