Alain Gomis’s three-hour Dao unfolds as a fluid meditation on family, identity, and belonging, dissolving the boundaries between fiction and reality as it traces the circular rhythms of life and death between France and Guinea-Bissau.
Dao premiered in the competition section of this year’s Berlinale, a three hour epic which weaves together fact and fiction, actors and non-actors, life and death. Director Alain Gomis won a Silver Bear for his 2017 film Félicité, which follows the story of a singer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This time, Gomis has set his sites on a wedding and a funeral, played out respectively between France and Guinea-Bissau, which serve as his key framing points for this sprawling tale.
Dao experiments heavily with narrative style, sense of place, and the very structure of filmic realism – more of a collective, rhythmic experience than any traditional, narrative drama. The very first shot sets the tone, opening with a definition of Dao – “A perpetual, circular movement that flows through everything and unites the world.” This is certainly a manifesto for the film to come.
We begin with casting. An off-screen voice announces, “the first step is to make this family,” and actors and non-actors are assembled. From there, the film moves between a wedding in France and funeral rituals in Guinea-Bissau, weaving fact and fiction so closely that it is impossible to tell where one ends and another begins; what is scripted, planned, directed, and what is spontaneous, documentarian, or improvisational.
At its centre are protagonists Gloria and her daughter Nour who travel together between the continents and the two ceremonies. Gloria anchors the movie as she moves between her worlds, guiding her daughter, teaching Nour about her heritage as she introduces her daughter to Guinea-Bissaun culture, whilst also watching her grow, fall in love, and get married. It is in this mother-daughter relationship that the film finds its emotional core.
With a run time of over three hours, the film demands patience – although, whilst it is long, it is not necessarily slow. It definitely sprawls as much as it lingers, and occasionally loses focus, but this is a film which aims less for constant entertainment and instead invites the audience to spend time, sit with and be a part of a family, a community, a celebration, a process of grieving.
Dao resists any attempt at categorisation, instead confidently and patiently demonstrating the multiplicities, contradictions, the rise and crest and crash of identity, family, celebration, grief and belonging. As stated from the very title card, Dao instead is about circular motion — life folding into death, France into Guinea-Bissau, performance into truth — and asks us to sit inside of that motion and emotion in a truly unique cinematic experience.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
