NZIFF Round Table Reviews: Dao (2026)

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF 

This is part of a series of roundtable discussions and extended dialogues conducted by Ricky Lai (@rickthelai), Trevor Pronoso (@CleverGurl), Madeline Smith (@prime4illusion), and Caeden Tipler (@ctipler) on films that have premiered at NZIFF 2026.

Dao (2026)

dir. Alain Gomis

France / Guinea-Bissau / Senegal, 185 mins

The following exchange is between Ricky and Trevor on Alan Gomis' latest film, Dao.

Trevor: If you told me this was a three-hour film that constantly crosscuts between a wedding and a funeral and explores all the interpersonal relationships of all the people involved, I would've mistaken it for a D.W. Griffith movie lmao. I apologise for the long convo we had and missing the first five minutes of the movie; I don't think we missed anything special (the 'talking heads' interview conceit of the characters in front of the camera) since the filmic structure is fairly straightforward and often repeats itself (in the same way one repeats the chorus of a song). I'll admit, the film favours some choruses more than others and often lacks the modulation of a Griffith film (narrative conflict) because Dao mostly employs an observational, verité gaze throughout. I dare not use the word 'ethnographic' since production-wise, Gomis is from West Africa. Still, I can't help feeling that he's a stranger to his own gaze/conception of his people and hometown.

Most fly-on-the-wall-type films suffer from directors/cameramen who can't come up with meaningful compositions on the spot, so they resort to being passive, wandering strangers trying to capture as much 'reality' as possible, trying to 'go with the flow' of the scene and the actors' improvisation. Either the shots are all close-ups, or they're wide shots that telegraph the 'negative space' between the character and the landscape. This is why I find most of Dao's compositions really uninspiring. Close proximity to a subject is not enough, which is why he resorts to the Griffith device of crosscutting to propel physiological/metaphorical momentum. But it's a momentum that's permanently stuck in first gear, constantly going back to its favourite choruses of celebration, drinking, eating, and communing, coalescing into an undifferentiating white noise to me. Crosscutting to (mostly) the same images. I can only remember two turning points/narrative conflicts throughout the film: the uninvited woman in Guinea-Bissau asking where the dead patriarch is, and the confrontational relationship between the two adult brothers in the French wedding. Both of them are resolved/ignored just as easily as Griffith's conflicts do, albeit the grim irony is replaced with earnest familial solidarity. Gomis and Griffith see 'harmony' as fundamental to human culture; the title of the film is Dao if it wasn't an indication already. And I know Gomis is well aware that this 'harmony' wouldn't be possible without the revolutionary efforts of his ancestors against colonisation. Maybe Gomis is just as grim as Griffith after all? Negation of a negation. The circle of life repeats.

Also the cinematography and editing weirdly reminds me of Shunji Iwai in its handheld camerawork and constant jump cuts (or cutting the scene short before it reaches its climax) I guess it's such a versatile style to depict disaffection (cutting off the boring bits of dead time and deliberately withholding catharsis simultaneously) Gloria has qualms with both French and West African culture that you might as well cut the fat and communicate your dissatisfaction directly (which she admits in her own words) or not speak at all (she is mostly a silent observer most of the way through).

Ricky: No problem re: missing the first five minutes, haha! Sometimes the pre-theatre convo's just that good. Griffith is an astute comparison. Through much of this, I was actually thinking about Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). There's pain, mourning, and unease about things (mainly people) being missing, but there's also a lot of singing. Lots, and lots of singing. In Dao's case, there's dancing, too. Sometimes it's hymns, sometimes it's The Fugees' Killing Me Softly. The song and dance isn't just leisurely, it's processive and methodical too, about who you're dancing with as well as where. Some of the most nerve-wracking dramas are punctuated by dance; I'm thinking of a scene shortly after the fight between the brothers, where one drunk attendee, as the dust settles in the night, starts popping half-balanced moves and topples over; the grins of onlookers beam in the distance. Some smiles you can see even from the men who are holding their brothers back from the scrap; are they bantering too? Looking back at themselves and laughing it off?

Another scene I remember well—funnily enough, the men once more—involves a light-hearted roundtable of yarns reminiscing on being punished physically for misbehaving as kids, which naturally roars into a full-blown roasting session once the sole Caucasian man chimes in with his insane story involving a lamp cable. Fjord, this is not—the boys are laughing it all off. The only tension in the room arises once one lad makes an incongruous comment about another's dual wives; polygamy seems not the matter for such folly. Just as a fight is on the verge of breaking out, the men close in with all smiles and cheer them on to embrace with a hug instead. And it's a nice, full-on hug, too. Gomis cuts between this scene and the younger boys playing football out in the yard, and dovetails the threads wonderfully by showing the parade of grown men spilling out onto the pitch and joining the children in an all-encompassing afternoon match of kicksies. Like you said, there is a lot of returning to harmony, and pondering the sustenance of said harmony.

Despite loving the film—there wasn't a single moment across the three-hour runtime that didn't interest me—I actually totally sympathise with your critiques about the cinematography. I'll only add that the footage resembles something of a rough cut, even; the camera(s) never truly get lost in the verité sequences, and it's persistently difficult to ignore its presence. There are jump cuts mid-monologue. The sound isn't patched up with any environmental ambience. Some shots haven't been white-balanced. The camera isn't totally fixed down sometimes, and sometimes rattles on the tripod. And there's a particularly superfluous cut between a medium-close shot of Gloria (Katy Correa) and another medium-close shot with the same setup but only a foot closer. These are not at all hard critiques, nor were they great distractions. But, I'm not convinced the chintziness enhances the film's free-wheeling format either. I did really like the insert near the end of one of the cameramen sleeping.

But what footage this is! Singing, dancing, football, planning, a group of kids helping their youngest find his parents and messing up his name, transport from one venue to the next, the bride and groom retreating for a private moment together, elders pouring liquor over the ground and stones, drumming mallets against hollow logs, sacrificial animal slaughter, the final ceremony where the cause of death is revealed. I've never thought so much during a film, at least since Michael Glawogger's Megacities (1998), about the idea of the camera as a device of forgiveness; the cinematic frame's ability to turn people into heroes, re-'inheritors' of their own souls.

Trevor: You're making me reconsider the role of dance and song as a form of ritualistic emotional processing. I guess what still bothers me is that Gomis' camera does not depict each dancing-and-singing sequence with any sense of modulation. He still films them all in the same register, which is why they come off more slight and repetitive than they should be. It's also further exasperated through the inconsistent editing; it strives to find this 'rhyming' of life through crosscutting of equivalences (i.e. if the French scenes are happy/sad the film then cuts to Guinea-Bissau scenes that are happy/sad) rather than cutting contrapuntally (the tour through the town in the last hour was a good change of pace, but even scenes like the planning and preparation of the celebrations in the beginning are too far in between and/or mentioned once and forgotten immediately to even consider them thematically relevant.) This is why the jump cut feels very misleading: it simultaneously forestalls resolution (or even any metaphorical/intellectual antithesis). It refuses to recontextualise the new positions of the character within the mise-en-scène (the superfluous cuts to the barely unchanged medium close-ups of Gloria, as you mention). The jump cuts give the false impression of immediacy and momentum. If anything, the longer Gomis hangs on a shot for a period of time, the more exciting it is. I actually didn't catch the cameraman sleeping lol. Call it a difference of temperament, but I wish Gomis disrupted the flow more frequently through more diverse means than just ending the scene mid-way (for now, it's merely just subtle lap dissolves and the talking heads interviews)

Never heard of Glawogger's Megacities before (it's on Solidarity Cinema, yay), but you make him sound like he's larping as a Fourth Cinema director lmao. I wanna hear more about this "camera as a device for forgiveness." I don't know what that means, and if that's the case for Dao, is he forgiving himself, or is it the community that has forgiven him during the film's production?

Ricky: I second-guessed whether or not to even make the Megacities comparison since the gaze (and scope) is so different—Dao is built on Gomis' firsthand knowledge of the proceedings and interpersonal dynamics in an extended family. I couldn't confirm to you whether the threads in Dao are based on real stories; they certainly remind me of people I (and the rest of us) may know (not to mention the many non-actors and real family members present), so I find the camera and filmmaker's ability to make those people visible—to sympathise with their presence—very generous. In the context of a wedding and consecration, which are about renewal and 'starting anew', that's moving. It gives the impression that everybody here, even the guests who people aren't too happy to see, has their role to play in said renewal. A very young boy cries in the yard because he's lost without his parents. A brother arriving days late to the wedding without telling anybody. A father whose ex-partner and daughter ask him to be gentle with his words. We don't know what led to these relationships, and also don't need to—the camera offers to concretise their processing of guilt and grief as part of a renewed narrative. You asked whether the forgiveness is between subject and filmmaker or a self-reflexive forgiveness—I see it as all of the above. In order to perform, whether as an actor or non-actor, you have to forgive the camera's presence (and its indifference). The filmmaker uses that camera to work through his memories and feelings and ultimately forgive himself (and his subjects).

Trevor: Just read this interview with Gomis from Variety. You pretty much got the gist of what he wants to achieve with the film. I like the way he calls these thematic throughlines we've been discussing "the real function of participation." You're right to think that everything we see in the film is based on Gomis' real-life experience attending his own father's funeral ceremony. Also, the shooting ratio for this film is roughly 66:1. These are Frederick Wiseman numbers lmao.

I guess if we're talking about long movies and the triumvirate relationship between the filmmaker, the camera, and the captured subjects, both Gomis and Wiseman do emphasise the behind-the-scenes, administrative activities of organisation and labour required to make the events depicted on-screen possible (Wiseman more so than Gomis, to be fair). What interests me is how I can totally make this comparison from a preliminary visual standpoint (verité style—although Wiseman genuinely hates the term, the interconnectedness/intersectionality of characters and their social roles, institutional oppression of people and families across multiple generations interacting with social systems of organisation and labour), but will immediately rebuff you when it comes to their editing styles. Both Gomis and Wiseman dabble in both documentary and narrative fiction filmmaking—I've got Wiseman's Un Couple (2022) on my hard drive but I haven't gotten around to watching yet—which is why I think there's something to be said about Gomis' M.O. to approach Dao as docufiction as compensating for a lack of editorial rigour and mise-en-scène as an extension/refutation of the actors' improv.

To grossly simplify, if you can't Jacques Rivette your way into composing improvised performances in real time or Wiseman your way into making editing and countershots the focal point of the film's drama, why go the extra mile in shooting so much footage in the first place? It's a question of whether the filmic material, as ethnographic evidence (docu) or as deliberate theatrical reconstructions of a narrative (fiction), is dialectically contextualised against each other. It's presumptuous to say the intruding camera requires the filmed subject to forgive its presence (Dao luxuriates in forgiveness and amelioration to its detriment personally). It's also presumptuous to say that Gomis' style of filmmaking isn't exploitative if transferred into a different context (imagine a white director shooting the celebrations the way Gomis does). Gomis doesn't really present a negation of his shooting style (self-awareness), and thus becomes aesthetically (read: culturally) infallible as a filmic work. Docufiction becomes a pluralist acceptance of reality (of harmony despite slavery) rather than an active problematising of reality's production of what is natural (the cold, hard recording of reality) and what is just (humans adjusting nature into concrete, meaningful forms through mise-en-scène and editing). Art is a process of subtracting reality and rearranging them after all.

Forgiving is not the same as dignifying, and the trouble is no one else except him knows whether the film he's made does his community justice because we, the audience, have no say in the matter (It's what makes Fourth Cinema irritating for mainstream audiences lol)

Ricky: The difference between dignifying/forgiving is a great point. I also thought about a Wiseman comparison—which you've outlined very well to reveal the limitations in Gomis' material—but didn't quite feel like the aims were the same, so I left it out. To nab a phrase from that Gomis interview, both do mosaic-style documentaries, a big picture comprised of various scenes. Although Wiseman's sense of counterpoint is stronger, Gomis' arrangements of said scenes are about as loose as his footage quality. The conjunction of what doesn't quite work in conjunction with what does, leaves me pretty intrigued, I'm strained to admit. I'm not sure another two hours of footage (as he says they shot) would've done the doc any good, but I'm very curious what might have been left on the cutting room floor.

I was totally unaware of Un Couple. Now that's something uncharacteristically intimate for Wiseman (what I've seen of him, anyway). Eyes peeled for that at some stage.

Trevor: I guess to cap off this discussion, what do you think of Dao in relation to the other films you've seen at the festival? It's certainly not the longest film you've seen at the festival, is all I'll say lmao. I know we've got two where all four of us will be watching together (All of a Sudden, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma). You seem attracted to catching all the 'three-hour' movies at the festival.

Ricky: I just got out of the new Claire Denis film, The Fence (it's okay), so it was nice to let a 100-minute film breeze by for a change, hahah. Just my luck that everything interesting me this season is lapsing the 180-minute mark. It was interesting seeing Dao and Dry Leaf one day after the other specifically (in the exact same seat at Academy too) since the former is teeming and colourful and lively, with so many different things to take in; the latter, being somewhat about photography, is so, so still, and rests on simple images against warm horizons. In Dry Leaf, the more bored I got, the more beautiful it began to seem to me—and the ending note suggests that you can still feel impressed and sentimental about the time you spent cold and waiting. In Dao, the three hours practically vaporise once the credits roll. I'm not sure which I prefer—or if I have a preference at all!