First-person documentaries immersed in family archives can at times feel claustrophobic, even when they achieve great dramatic ends. Fortunately, Alice Diop’s nonfiction feature, We, is quite the opposite. Like a thread unspooling, Diop delicately, with generosity, repeatedly links her family’s immigration from Senegal and subsequent life in France to the stories of strangers. Not all are immigrants; some are French-born but live far from their places of birth, or their lives have been marked by that other significant, often hidden displacement—of belonging to a lower class. In this sense, Diop uses cinema to expand what the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls one’s immediate circle of concern.Diop begins her film commenting in the voiceover on how little footage she has of her mother: 18 minutes, in which her mother appears “only fleetingly.” Diop shows a sample of these brief ordinary moments, such as when her mother is...
- 3/4/2021
- MUBI
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