Connections / disconnections: on Alice Diop’s Nous

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers how Alice Diop’s documentary Nous/We (2021) challenges the myopia of hegemonic colourblind constructions of France and its people. Its title both raises a question (who are we?) and implicitly asserts an inclusive answer. But the film is not a reductively integrationist project. Indeed, it challenges this central policy of the French state and stages an interrogation of contemporary France, where, as Trica Danielle Keaton et al have put it, ‘race does not officially reside, even as racism and discrimination are long-term residents’. The author examines how Nous maps out a discursive space between the poles of forced assimilation and ghettoisation (communautarisme) that acknowledges racialisation and the racial dimensions of exploited labour, urban planning and social housing, but also tracks some points of inter-ethnic connection. The article argues that the film is three things at once: a self-reflexive celebration of filmmaking as an act of creative geography that moves across time and space to forge connectivity as well as tracking disjunctions; a documentation of everyday life and social diversity, particularly among the frequently demonised or simply ignored Parisian banlieues; and an indictment of the failure of the French state to properly recognise and value this diversity.