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EXCLUSIVE: French screenwriter and director Simon Moutaïrou spent summers as a teenager in his father’s native country of Benin in West Africa.
Etched on his memory from this time are the trips to its so-called slave coast and port city of Ouidah, through which more than one million Africans passed in the 18th and early 19th centuries ahead of being transported overseas for a life of slavery.
“There is an enormous red brick arch commemorating these deportations, ‘The Door of No Return’,” says Moutaïrou.
“I couldn’t get my head around this idea of such inequality between people, or human beings being treated like animals. When my father or uncles talked to me about what had happened, my adolescent spirit couldn’t fathom it … but it always stayed in the back of my mind.”
Some 20 years on, Moutaïrou’s feature directorial debut No Chains, No Masters is making waves in France as the first local production in decades to tackle the country’s involvement in the slave trade.
“There have been dozens of films about slavery out of America but very few out of France, two or three maybe, and then 30 years ago,” he comments.
Set in Mauritius in the early 19th century, when the Indian Ocean Island was under French rule, No Chains, No Masters lays bare the brutal treatment of imported African slaves working on its sugar plantations, but also offers a universal tale of resistance in the face of oppression.
Senegalese actor Ibrahima Mbaye (Atlantics, Wara) and newcomer Anna Diakhere Thiandoum co-star as Massamba and Mati, a father and daughter enslaved on a plantation, who rebel against its regime of violence and make a perilous bid for freedom.
Benoît Magimel also features in the cast as a ruthless plantation owner, alongside Camille Cottin, in a rare baddie role as domineering slave catcher Madame La Victoire. Félix Lefebvre and Vassili Schneider play her character’s sons.
This first feature for Moutaïrou follows a successful screenwriting career, with credits including Julien Leclercq’s action thriller The Assault and The Crew; Xavier Gens’ bachelor party comedy Budapest, Yann Gozlan’s aircraft crash mystery-thriller Black Box and environmental thriller Goliath.
The production is also a career landmark for lead producer and ex-Studiocanal exec Nicolas Dumont, as his first project to reach fruition since joining forces with Hugo Sélignac at Mediawan’s Paris-based production company Chi Fou Mi.
Main backer Studiocanal is launching the film in France with a wide release today and has also secured a raft of early international deals to Benelux (O’Brother), Switzerland (Frenetic Films), Portugal (Outsider Films), Scandinavia (Scanbox Entertainment), Iceland (Myndform), Eastern Europe, excluding Poland and ex-Yugoslavia (Prorom) and CIS (Exponenta).
Pathé BC Afrique will handle the release into French-speaking Africa, while ICC and Maurefilms have jointly acquired rights to the islands of La Reunion and Mauritius.
The release marks the culmination of a 15-year creative journey for Moutaïrou who came across the story of the community of runway slaves, or Maroons, during a trip to Mauritius in 2009.
“I was walking on the southwest of the island when I came across an immense mountain facing the sea called the Le Morne Brabant. While I was having lunch with my wife, a creole lady told us about its history and how during the time of French rule, slaves had fled the plantations, extricating themselves from the colonial system, and gathered on the summit of the mountain,” he recalls.
Moutaïrou loved the story and on his return to Paris started doing more research, discovering that the mountain was classed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a symbol of marronage, or resistance to slavery.
“We all know slavery existed, what is less explored is that wherever slavery existed, there was always also resistance,” he says. “There’s an aspect of the story that could appeal to everyone whatever their age or colour, for what it says about human dignity and resistance to oppression.”
Dumont says this angle was a driving force in the project.
“What was important for us was to restore a form of pride to these characters by truly making them the subjects of the film, rather than portraying them uniquely as victims,” he says.
“The Maroons are the real subjects as they revolt and take their destiny into their own hands… in a story of rebellion that is as relevant today, as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow.”
The protagonists of Massamba and Mati also chime with the pair’s ambition to create authentic black heroes and heroines.
“That was our original pact with François Mergier and Anna Marsh at Studiocanal,” says Moutaïrou, referring to the studio’s head of French production and CEO. “My model growing up was Denzel Washington. As an adolescent in France in the 1990s, our heroes were American. We were lacking in black heroes, although it’s changed a bit since then.”
He and Dumont heap praise on Mbaye and Thiandoum for their performances.
“Anna came to the casting in Senegal with a friend and Simon selected her out of 500 young women. She had never acted before but brought such incandescence, such force,” comments Dumont.
The producer also salutes Mbaye for taking on the psychologically tough role of Massamba.
“We were doing an initial reading of the script with Ibrahima in Paris. When the N-word was pronounced he left the room,” recounts Moutaïrou.
“No one really knew what was happening to him, but he needed take on the weight of this slave journey on his shoulders… He is one of West Africa’s best-known actors, but there was something in the role that was bigger than him… it was more than just a film for him.”
Moutaïrou cites his admiration for U.S. slavery-themed pictures such as 12 Years A Slave, Django Unchained, Amistad and Mandingo, but says he was keen to make a film that had its own flavor.
“We needed to find our own voice… which we found through the film’s Africanity. The African language Wolof is spoken in the film, along with other African languages,” he says.
“In France, with our multi-faceted identity and the waves of immigration which made France what it is today, we were able to make a film that is authentically African in its heart, that differentiates it from the American films.”
At the same time as being an inspirational story, the film also plunges the spectator into the brutal treatment of slaves on the sugar plantations.
“Nicolas and I talked about this a lot. We felt showing the entire picture, reinforced the beauty of this fragile community on the top of the mountain. It was important to show where they came from and the concentration camp-like horror of the slave system,” says Moutaïrou.
The violence in the film echoes scenes capturing the abuse of African slaves in Ava Duvernay’s Origin, in protagonist Isabel Wilkerson suggests a connection between the treatment of Black people under the transatlantic slave trade and the suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust.
“I haven’t seen the film, but I agree with the comparison in the sense that the transportation of the slaves and the plantations are dark spots in history. These are moments in history like the gas chambers, where humanity completely disappeared,” comments Moutaïrou.
“I draw a lot of inspiration from West Indian literature,” he adds, then recalling the words of the late Martinique writer and poet Édouard Glissant. “He wrote that in the hold of the slave ship, he could have said it of the plantations too, no god, no belief, no scarification, which was the mark of their faith, could explain what was going on.”
“It is the role of cinema to make these dark points in history real. That used to be an inherent part of cinema, this political aspect. Today that’s less the case but we need to talk about our past, because it’s part of what we are today.”
This view on cinema’s political responsibility chimes with Dumont, who spent eight years working for environmentally-focused director Jacques Perrin’s production company Galatée Films early on in his career.
“When Simon plunged into the archives of the period, looking for accounts from Maroons. What he found was stories of survival, talking about the violence on the plantations, the hunger, the dogs that pursued them as they hid in the forests. There could be no complacency in the way violence is shown, but it still had to be shown.”
Beyond the hard-hitting subject-matter and ambitions for the film, No Chains, No Masters is also made for a mainstream audience, with Montaïrou tapping into his genre-writing experience to include action-thriller and fantasy elements in the storytelling.
The $8.6M (€7.8M) production shot in May and June of 2023 on location in Mauritius, where it faced the challenge of unseasonably wet weather.
“The Mauritians had told us it was the wedding season but then we had a typhoon, mudslides and torrential rain… on top of what was already a complex shoot, given it was on an island, with animals, arms, children, costumes and scenes at sea,” says Dumont.
“I could deal with anything in terms of production now… it was my Lost in La Mancha moment… but in many ways, at the same time, these challenges united everyone involved in the film even more.”
In spite of the strong performances and topicality of France’s slavery heritage , neither Cannes nor its parallel sections, nor the fall festivals selected the film. Moutaïrou and Dumont are not dwelling too heavily on this fact
“Perhaps the combination of arthouse and genre made it difficult to place, it’s hard to say… we’ve moved on and are focusing on the release. It’s true that a festival selection can help add color to a local release, but there are plenty of films that exist outside of the festival circuit,” comments Dumont.
The film is releasing amid a bumpy political period for France, and at a time when the country is questioning its past and future trajectory as well as its sense of national identity.
Moutaïrou suggests this makes for perfect timing, even if the brutality shown in the film could provoke anger in some quarters.
“I couldn’t be prouder that the film is coming out in this political context. We’ve had the European elections, the French parliamentary elections, the Olympic Games. It’s been a long time since France has talked so much about its identity and what France is,” he says.
“I hope it will spark debate. Perhaps there will be even anger, related to the beginning of the film, but if that happens, I believe the film will ultimately have a cathartic effect.”
