Just a Movement

Just a Movement / Juste un Mouvement 
Vincent Meessen, Belgium, France, 2021, 108′

An innovative account of the life of Senegalese Maoist activist Omar Blondin Diop and a free adaptation of Godard’s La Chinoise.

Juste un Mouvement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in 1967 in Paris. Relocating its roles and characters fifty years later to Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character. Shot exclusively with non-professional actors and including Omar Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, everyone in this film performs themselves: a filmmaker, a rapper, a poet, a Chinese worker, a Shaolin master, a Senegalese intellectual, the Minister of Culture of Senegal and the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China. 

“It isn’t an enquiry into his death, but rather a film about his survival. My project was twofold from the start: firstly, to paint a portrait of Omar by listening to the relations lived, and thus to allow the Senegalese to be able to debate this figure, his legacy, and the meaning of his engagements anew. But being neither a historian nor a documentary filmmaker, it was important for me to reinforce this portrait-in-his-absence – and that can thus be qualified as spectral – with a cinematographic experimentation capable of connecting the projections and desires of yesterday with those formulated today. To be able, at the same time, to portray Chinese- Senegalese relations from Omar’s Maoist phase to the stakes of the current state’s bargaining with China, to sound out the young generation of militants’ relationship to the figure of political martyr, or again to try to elucidate the way in which Omar embodies a blind spot in Godard’s cinema.” – Vincent Meessen