Night of the Kings

Lacôte is a master at staging hectic crowd scenes in which chaos suddenly arranges itself into patterns, connections, and poetry.

In capturing and preserving a long-standing oral tradition, he has arrived at both a persuasive vision of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. Like all good storytellers, he leaves you wanting more.

Night Of The Kings captures the elusive recent past of Ivorian political turmoil. It's also, perhaps just as significantly, an entrancingly fun time at the movies.

A power struggle and a ritual practiced by the collective within a microcosm of society housed under the oppression of the state, and a powerful demonstration of the transporting, and liberating, power of narrative.

Director Phillipe Lacôte balances despair and levity, humanizing the forgotten through a potent blend of African fables, improvisation, and hope-however fleeting.

The film succeeds in this measure by giving every single performer a distinct personality no matter the screen time.

The story flows and moves to the rhythm produced by the inmates' chanting and dancing, and it's not long until the audience is feeling that rhythm, as well.

Like its actors, the movie has a distinctly powerful presence you won't soon forget.

Lacôte manages to keep all of this material afloat and infuses "Night of the Kings" with a constant sense of danger. People inside the walls of La Maca could die at any second, but the red moon outside doesn't bode well, either.

It's not just this story that's worth experiencing, but all the aspects of filmmaking.