Official Selection out of Competition | France, Germany, Senegal, Belgium, Lebanon | Lingala, with Arabic subtitles | 123 min
Proud and independent, Félicité is a singer in a bar in the shanty towns of the Congo's capital Kinshasa. She is totally dedicated to her music and that is reflected in the amazing relation she has with her audience in spite of her daily suffering and the surrounding misery and violence. Her music and nightly performances are the very essence of her life until her son has a horrific accident. She struggles to raise the money needed for her son's treatment which takes her through the streets of the impoverished as well as the more affluent districts of the Congolese capital. She is confronted with all types of oppression and corruption until one of the bar’s regular customers, a man named Tabu offers to help her and she reluctantly accepts. After his stay in hospital, Félicité’s son has a hard time recovering. It is Tabu of all people, who manages to coax him out of his rough moments and helps him through convalescence. Félicité’s sparsely
furnished apartment, that is quite literally falling apart, becomes a heaven in a harsh country that holds no hope for most of its population. Felicité, her son and Tabu, an unlikely trio, find themselves thrown together to confront their difficult times and support one another.
Alain Gomis is a Franco-Guinea Bissawan-Senegalese director. He was born in 1972 in France, where he grew up. In 2001, his debut feature, L’Afrance, won the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. His 2012 film Tey, starring Saul Williams, was screened in Competition at the Berlinale and won the Golden Stallion at Fespaco. A partner at Granit Films along with Nigerian director Newton Aduaka and French director Valérie Osouf, Gomis also works with producer Oumar Sall (Cinékap) on a training program for young filmmakers and technicians in Senegal (Up Court-métrages). Félicité is his fourth feature film and the winner of the Silver Bear, Grand Jury award -Berlinale 2017.
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