Zonzon

In the opening scene, the camera is placed in a prison-cell toilette. A face is time and again brutally dipped into the water. A big, bald and tattooed giant is in the middle of beating and assaulting another prisoner. He is cheered on by an animated Arab who is singing and dancing. The alarm goes off, the guard rushes in and the Arab and the giant are sent to the isolation cells.
Zonzon is a film about three prisoners with different background. The giant, Francky, is sentenced to ten years for a murder that was actually carried out by h is friend. The Arab Kader is sentenced to two years for robbery and the student Arnaud is sentenced to six months for a hash deal.
They all come from different social backgrounds, different languages and different perspectives on their lives. Francky has a life with wife and children on the outside, a life that is slowly slipping away from him, a fact that leads to frustration that he acts out with violence.
Kader has made his prison stay into something of a life style and is comparably free of worries. Arnaud is forced to change his behaviour to elude battering and harassment. We get to follow these
three individuals and their process of creating a community, that is necessary to survive the total isolation.
Zonzon is originally based on a play.
The film gives a look into a claustrophobic environment, which is as hard as a rock, and where the language is a mess of genital-words and swearwords, and where inner aggressions are taken out on who ever is standing closest. It is about basic human needs, such as love, sexual contact and freedom, as well as what one is forced to do when one is deprived of them. It is about the excruciating psychological torture that is incarceration.
The acting is impressive and wonderfully liberating, as it often is in French film. The dialogues sometimes reach the same level of authenticity, as in the films by Robert Altman. The imagery is quick and firmly stylished. I n that way the film joins in the new, younger tradition of French film, which has been created by film-makers such as Luc Besson, Jean Jaques Beneix and Leos Carax.
BJÖRN HESSLE

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Medverkande
Pascal Greggory,Gael Moral: Producent
Jean Cottin: Manus
Patrick de Lassagne: Foto
Gilles Henry: Musik
Jérome Coullet: Talat språk
French