Donoma
Director: Djinn Carrénard
Writer: Djinn Carrénard
Cast: Emilia Dérou-Bernal, Sékouba Doucouré, Salomé Blechmans, Matthieu Longuatte, Laetitia Lopez, Vincente Perez, Laura Kpegli
Part of: Viennale

[TRIGGER WARNING]

Plot:
Spanish teacher Analia (Emilie Dérou-Bernal) has trouble with one of her young male students, Dacio (Vincente Perez) and she goes on to try and solve her problems in a very unconventional way. In the meantime Dacio’s girlfriend Salma (Salomé Blechmans) starts to question her agnosticism, while the young photographer Chris (Laura Kpegli) wants to test the randomness of love by choosing the stranger Dama (Sékouba Doucouré) to live with her – without ever having talked to him before.

Donoma is a no-budget production and as much as I want to give credit to Carrénard to pull off a feature film on 200 bucks, the result doesn’t really speak for the process.

The movie and I got off to a very wrong start with the first story already, the one with Analia and Dacio. Basically out of frustration because Dacio won’t submit to her in class, she sexually assaults him. We hear about this as she later – laughingly – tells her friends about the incident. One of them protests that what she’s doing is illegal (not wrong or rape, mind you, only illegal) but her complaints get literally drowned out by the laughter. I don’t think that anybody realized they were doing a story about rape at all – instead, since the rapee is a guy who is in love with the rapist, it’s all fine and dandy.

That it then goes on to convert the only outspoken agnostic in a supersmart teenagers discuss god storyline was more annoying than everything else, but it didn’t help me to like the film either. Though it didn’t unnerve me as much as the whole storyline between Chris and Dama that was just plain dumb.

Seeing as the stories didn’t work for me, it really couldn’t make up for the fact that the technology had all the no-budget shortcomings, from mediocre picture to really bad sound.

At least the cast wasn’t bad. The dialogues felt very natural, probably because they were improvised a lot. And even though I did not like this film, I like the idea of making films like they made this one.

Summarising: Really not my cup of tea.