93 min | NR | February 26, 2021 | Neon
A young pickpocket lands in MACA, a prison outside Abidjan that the inmates run themselves. On the night of the red moon, the dying boss names him Roman and orders him to tell a story to the whole cell block. When the story ends, he dies.
A young pickpocket arrives at MACA, a prison outside Abidjan that its own inmates govern. The state has surrendered the place to the men inside it. A dying boss called Blackbeard rules the population, and his grip is slipping. On the night of the red moon he names the newcomer Roman and gives him a role with one rule. Roman must tell a story to the assembled prison, and when the story ends, he dies. Philippe Lacôte builds the film around a man inventing narrative to stay alive, and he turns the act of telling into a literal fight for survival.
Koné Bakary plays Roman with raw terror and improvisation. He does not know the story he is telling until the words leave his mouth, and Bakary lets the fear show under every invention. Steve Tientcheu plays Blackbeard as a ruler clinging to a throne his failing body can no longer hold. Denis Lavant plays Silence, an inmate who guards a live rooster and speaks in broken fragments, and he brings a feral unpredictability to the floor. Digbeu Jean Cyrille plays Half-Mad as a rival circling the weakened boss. The ensemble works as a single organism, absorbing Roman’s tale and giving it back as movement and noise.
Philippe Lacôte writes and directs, and his control of the single-night structure never slips. He stages the prison as a theater. The inmates gather in tiers and answer Roman in call-and-response, swaying and chanting until the room becomes a chorus. Dancers physicalize his words while the camera prowls through the crowd. Lacôte then cross-cuts from the cell block to the streets of Abidjan, dramatizing the rise of the dead gang leader Roman conjures and folding the country’s recent history into the fable. The film moves between gritty realism and open myth without breaking the spell.
This is a film about the power of a story to organize chaos. Roman has no script and no plan. He survives by reading what his audience needs to hear and giving it to them one beat at a time. Lacôte ties that ancient bargain to Ivory Coast’s cycles of violence and rule. The result is a lean fable that treats storytelling as life and death and means it literally.