The Showdown

La Nuit de la Vérité

- The Night Of Truth -

An AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES Film Pick

::

Director: Fanta Régina Nacro; Language: French, Mooré and Dioula, with English subtitles; Running time: 100 minutes




In a fictitious country in sub-saharan Africa, the leader of the ruling "Nayak" people and the leader of the opposition "Bonandés" along with their respective retinue of armed soldiers come together to finalize and celebrate a landmark truce between the two warring tribes. ...

... A huge feast and festive ceremony are prepared to commemorate this occasion. But on the night of this event the atmosphere of fear and mistrust is palpable. A decade of atrocities and slaughter between the enemy camps is hard to lay to rest, good intentions notwithstanding.

In the end, this is the story of a flawed hero tormented by his past crimes, and a mother driven to insanity by an unmitigated desire for revenge, a scenario mimicking the classic Shakespearean tragedies.
The denouement will shock and surprise the viewer.


Read about it at Link TV

This is the award-winning feature debut by one of Africa's most talented female directors, Fanta Régina Nacro, who shaped this plot after the real and factual fate of her own uncle.

"I had long struggles with my cinematographer," Nacro says, "to get him not to look for the perfect shot, the perfect light, the beautifully composed image - because that was not what I needed. What I wanted was the reality of things, to capture the immediacy of things even if they weren't beautiful."


[Warning: This film contains extremely violent and macabre scenes]

UPDATE, MARCH 2012: The entire web seems to have been scrubbed clean of video clips from this film. Do we smell the stench of censorship...?

.