OMEN
Genre
Drama
Running time
90 minutes
Year
2023
Language
French
Subtitle
English
Country
Belgium, Netherlands and Democratic Republic of the Congo
Director
Baloji
Bio
Producer
Benoît Roland
Cast
Marc Zinga, Lucie Debay, Eliane Umuhire, Yves-Marina Gnahoua, Marcel Otete Kabeya
Scriptwriter
Baloji
When Koffi returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo with his Belgian wife Alice, he is hoping her pregnancy will help break the ice with his estranged family. Instead, he is pulled back into a society governed by superstition and fear, shown by the director’s allusive, intuitive storytelling to be the legacy of trauma as much as tradition. In four sections focused on different characters – Koffi, the sister Tshala he left behind, a fly young street trader in antibiotics called Paco and Koffi’s emotionally wounded mother, Mujila, - this visually rich and musically vivid film weaves between witchcraft, ritual purging and streetsmart modernity, much as Koffi’s family – and, by extension, this suffering country – are wont to do.
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