Hope

Boris Lojkine, 2015, 86 min.
Film screening followed by discussion with director Boris Lojkine and Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, moderated by Nora Philippe

Genre: Fiction, Drama. French production. Filmed in: Morocco. Languages: French, English, Arabic, Lingala, Wolof, and more, with English subtitles.
New York City Premiere

Deep in the Sahara desert, as they try to get to Europe, Léonard, a young man from Cameroon, rescues Hope, a Nigerian woman. In a fiercely hostile world where safety requires staying with one’s own people, these two try to find their way together, and to love each other. Hope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (Semaine de la Critique, SACD award) and was theatrically released in France in 2015, after having been widely shown around the world, and specifically on the African continent. The two leading actors won acting awards at Tübingen Festival. Lojkine had directed award-winning documentaries about Vietnam before shooting this first feature film. For Hope, he exclusively worked with non-professional actors whom he cast for several months in Rabat among the migrants, while finishing writing the script. Shot in Morocco and in a dozen languages, Hope describes the underground world of migration from the inside, the business it relies on, and the extreme gender-based violence. “Boris Lojkine filmed Sub-Saharan migration in a way that has never been shown before. A complete shock.” (Le Point)

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