Donoma

Salma

Chris and Dama

Analia

Donoma by Haiti-born writer-director Djinn Carrénard, my 8th film at the FFF, and his first, is unlike any other films that I have seen. It's a thought provoking documentary shot on a digital video-cam at a cost of less than 200 Euros with amateur actors who improvised their lines and takes place at St Denis at the suburbs of Paris. It traces the lives of four different contemporary French women, one older and three younger, all looking for some kind satisfying love relations or of values to anchor their lives, but each in her own ways. The title of the film Donoma means "Le jour est là." or the day has arrived or sunrise.

As the film starts, we see Dacio (Vincente Perez) trying to kiss Salma (Salomé Blechmans) who said that he is not doing it the right way. The boy complains that they come from different worlds: her from a world of culture, he from a broken family whose father would not hesitate to beat him up. Salma who was always looking for something more spiritual, a sign from her destiny, was living with her sister strricken with cancer who had eventually to be removed to a hospital in a wheelchair and was always trying to look for that sign from a train station in which by accident she saw a frail young man Raîné (Matthieu Longuatte) in a passing train compartment always making a sign of the cross. She later finally summoned enough courage to board that train to talk to him and learned that he was on a similar quest. But when they met, after she had had what she thought was a religious revelation (stigmata appearing on her wrists) which the shrink she was seeing suggests may be delusional and that most probably she cut herself in her religious trance and that she needed to be hospitalized immediately for treatment, something which she resolutely refused to believe. She also claimed to be able to levitate two or three inches above the ground! To her surprise, Rainé is not the saint that she thought him to be . He confessed that he used to be a skinhead and a criminal but is now just trying his best not to fall into temptation again and prayer seemed his own way.

Dacio seems also to be linked to another protagonist, a Spanish woman Analia ( Emilia Dérou-Bernal ) trying her very best to be a good Spanish teacher at a professional training night school with that insolent student who never seemed to be really interested in what she put into her lessons. To her, her Spanish roots meant a great deal ; it's what gave her life meaning. To attract the attention of Dacio, he seduced him after class and then made him sign a paper in Spanish saying that he wanted to make love to his Spanish teacher and told him that if he did not behave in future, she would show that to the principal. He did and all his classmates observed a different Dacio after that he did. She then related the story to her colleagues in half embarrassment as a tale of academic and moral triumph. But one day, Dacio turned up at the entrance of her apartment. She was mad but after learning that Dacio had no home to go because he had a violent father, she relented and allowed him to continue to sit with his back against the wall on the staircase landing in front of the door to her apartment and the two got to talking about what is important to each. After that she nearly cracked up in class, doing a kind of spontaneous rap dance on the desk singing a self-improvised rap song about what touched her most deeply.

The third story relates to another pair Leelop (Laettia Lopez), a photographer and Dama (Séskouba Doucouré) whom she met in New York after a year and half ago and photographed in a project which brought her huge success which enabled her to buy an apartment in Paris and who was living with her as cohabitee. They were interviewed by a social worker who was interested in whether they were living as a couple because Dama was receiving social security benefits. Her questions made the "couple" think seriously about their relationship. In the course of the interview, when asked about whether they considered their present strate would continue, Dama was surprised to hear for the first time, that Leelop thought that their relations would probably continue for another three months. After the social worker was gone, Dama left and went to ask for help from her sister, who previously told him that he could come to her whenever he pleased if he needed help because they were family. But he was at first rejected because he did not give her any prior notice but once he admitted he was wrong, her sister took him in and washed his hair and took good care of him.

The fourth story is that of a virgin Chris (Laura Krepi) originally from Ghana but was later adopted by a diplomat and brought to France now working as a photographer and Dama, who had just broken up with Leelop. She was interested in exploring how a relationship can develop merely relying on body language, written notes and sign language in the form of inventive gestures without ever speaking. She picked him up at a metro station. It failed in the end of about a month and the couple had to talk.

The film is an extremely long film (about 135 minutes !) and its structure loose and captivates simply on the quality of the intensity of its dialogues, an attempt to interrogate the meaning of the lives of various young and not so young people. To me it seems a postmodernist attempt to question the values of modernity in the context of class, race, culture, gender and family and religious values and madness: full of ironies and pathos, done with a blazing and rasping honesty. Needless to say, the quality of cinematography leaves a great deal to be desired. But then when we consider its budget, perhaps that can be forgiven.