Movies can expose audiences to places they've never been to, or create entirely new worlds of their own. Night of the Kings, director Philippe Lacôte's second narrative feature and the Ivory Coast's submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, does both. Its setting, La MACA prison, is a real place, and the portrayal of the prison's unique culture blends gritty realism and dramatic exaggeration. The all-night storytelling ritual at the center of the film is actually real. The real-life inmates, however, don't traditionally murder storytellers who fail to make it through the night.
Our protagonist, played by Koné Bakary and dubbed "Roman" by his fellow prisoners, is a new arrival, and a member of a gang known as the Microbes. He's as overwhelmed and confused by La MACA as the audience is. The sheer crowdedness of the place is enough to make you actually appreciate social distancing, and these crowds (many of them played by actual inmates) can turn violent at a moment's notice. The guards are powerless compared to Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu), the head prisoner known as the Dangoro, but tradition demands Blackbeard soon kill himself due to his failing health.
Blackbeard's last action as Dangoro is to put Roman through the storytelling ritual. Roman tells the story of the gangster Zama King. When Silence, the prison's one white inmate who's always carrying a chicken and played by Denis Lavant, tells Roman he needs to keep the story going all night to protect his life, Roman expands the story backwards in time and into the realms of both fantasy and politics, with magic duels, civil wars and surprise twists all involved in the narrative. As he tells this story, his audience hangs on every word with praise, criticism or questions. In many visually striking scenes, the prisoners break into dance choreography enacting the story being told.
Watching Night of the Kings, you feel like you're experiencing something both totally unique and building upon the culture of the past, from traditional griots to 1,001 Arabian Nights to Shakespeare to City of God. It's a wild work of magical realist cinema that finds beauty amidst a truly ugly situation. Ironically for a movie about expanding upon a story as long as possible, the ending is very abrupt, and a few minutes more in the aftermath of the night would have been appreciated. Clearly a movie's doing something right when the biggest complaint you can make about it is that there's not more of it.
Night of the Kings stars Koné Bakary, Steve Tientcheu, Rasmané Ouédraogo, Issaka Sawadogo, Digbeu Jean Cyrille, Abdoul Karim Konaté, Anzian Marcel, Laetitia Ky and Denis Lavant. It played at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals and will play at the New York Film Festival from September 24-September 29. Neon will release it later this year.