The thrilling tale of filmmaker Simon Moutaïrou about marronage, the conquest of freedom in the time of slavery

Based on historical facts, the first feature film by the Franco-Beninese filmmaker is a hard-hitting chronicle of resistance to slavery in 18th century France.

The victims of the slave trade have always sought to break their chains, at every stage of their captivity. No chains, no masters by Simon Moutaïrou, in theaters September 18, 2024, is a film about marronage. The practice consisted of a slave escaping from his master’s property.

For his first film, for which he is also the screenwriter, the Franco-Beninese director goes back in time and propels the spectators to the current Mauritius Island within a population of slaves, originally from Senegal, who really existed. In 1759, on the Isle de France, Mati (Anna Diakhere Thiandoum) and his father Massamba (Ibrahima Mbaye) become runaway slaves. On their trail, the fearsome Madame la Victoire (Camille Cottin) hired by their owner, Eugène Larcenet (Benoît Magimel).

The escaped slaves and those who are after them – the huntress and her sons – engage in a merciless battle. The only acceptable outcome for the former is freedom. Massamba had always hoped to put an end to his condition as a slave in the proper way: to be freed. Is he not, through the indispensable “mediator” of this plantation, he who handles both Wolof and “the language of the White” that his master’s son taught him, an abolitionist?

Young Mati, for her part, defends the option of fleeing in order to find other slaves who have already snatched their freedom. When she escapes from the Larcenet plantation, her father is driven by his paternal instinct. At 100 miles an hour, Massamba sets off in search of her in the heart of a hostile nature, but one that can be tamed for the needs of the cause. Moutaïrou sometimes even speeds up the image to give more rhythm to his story.

Simon Moutaïrou breathes an epic and philosophical dimension into a historical reality. This brings substance to a production that mixes action, thriller and fantasy. The cast transports the audience just like a breathtaking photo. But it is along the way that the filmmaker reviews the strategies of the different actors – exploited and exploiters – living in this slave society. Regaining one’s freedom, Moutaïrou also suggests, means rediscovering one’s cultural identity for enslaved people. The quest goes beyond a simple physical and material aspiration.

Encouraged by Mati, Massamba thus reconnects with the spirituality of her Senegalese ancestors that the initiate had as if buried at the same time as his freedom. Her faith is confronted with that of the Catholic Madame La Victoire who, she too, calls upon her God whose relays of the time tirelessly assure that the Blacks of Africa “have no soul”. Of the “beasts” to whom the cruel rules of the Black Code can be applied.

Before becoming a director, Simon Moutaïrou is a storyteller. And he has succeeded in nourishing his first feature film with a symbolic dimension that gives it the scope of the films in the saga Black Panther. Works that make no secret of their reason for being: to remind us that black people cannot be summed up in the clichés conveyed by those who dominated them for centuries.

Their story also and obviously includes grandiose individual and collective episodes. The Franco-Beninese half-breed reaffirms this through the magic of cinema. Just like the African-American Ryan Coogler, in Black Panther, had done so in the service of a form of restoration of the collective imagination about the African continent and its diaspora.

In No chains, no masters, Simon Moutaïrou revisits the fate of human beings who risk everything in the name of their right to self-determination. As he shows in his film, the subject has spanned centuries. The claim is still strong among Afro-descendants who still fight against a multitude of clichés and prejudices. The latest legislative campaigns in France and the surge of racism that accompanied them, as well as Donald Trump’s recent comments on Haitian immigrants who eat cats and dogs, leave no doubt on the subject.

Gender : Drama
Filmmaker: Simon Moutairou
Distribution : Ibrahima Mbaye, Camille Cottin, Anna Diakhere Thiandoum, Benoît Magimel, Felix Lefebvre, Vassili Schneider, Lancelot Courcieras
Country : France
Duration : 1h37
Exit : September 18, 2024
Distributer : Studio Canal

Synopsis: 1759. Isle de France (now Mauritius). Massamba and Mati, slaves on Eugène Larcenet’s plantation, live in fear and toil. He dreams of his daughter being freed, she of leaving the green hell of sugar cane. One night, she runs away. Madame La Victoire, a famous slave hunter, is hired to track her down. Massamba has no choice but to escape in turn. By this act, he becomes a “maroon”, a fugitive who breaks forever with the established order.