Details

Release year: 1988

Storyline

A French woman returns to her childhood home in Cameroon - formerly a colonial outpost - where she's flooded by memories, particularly of Protée, her servant.

Top credits

Directors

Claire Denis

Writers

Cast

Isaach De Bankolé — Protée
Giulia Boschi — Aimée Dalens
François Cluzet — Marc Dalens
Jean-Claude Adelin — Luc

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Did you know

• In a 1989 interview with Judy Stone, Claire Denis explained that the title, comes from the 1950s slang meaning "to be had, to be cheated", and thus refers to the status in French Cameroon of being black and being cheated; it is also an allusion to Protée's dark-brown skin and the racial fetishism of Africans by Europeans.

• Towards the end of the film, France's father reveals a central theme of the film as he explains to her what the horizon is. He tells her that it is a line that is there but not there, a symbol for the boundaries that exists in the country between rich and poor, master and servant, white and black, coloniser and colonised, male and female; a line that is always visible but impossible to approach or pass.

• The film is semi-autobiographical -Claire Denis was raised in a French colonial family in West Africa [from 1948 - 1963]. She was two months old when she moved from her native France to Africa. Denis's family stayed in Cameroon for three years after its 1960 independence. Her father set up a radio station for the new government.