In Night of the Kings (La Nuit des rois), a young man thrown into the infamous La Maca prison in Cote d’Ivoire is forced to invent a story that lasts until sunrise or face the consequences like some kind of modern-day Scheherazade.
This captivating hybrid of a movie mixes fairy-tale and storytelling elements with a vividly drawn backdrop of heightened realism —no one would mistake this prison for a luxury resort — and relies on images and sounds as much as the human voice to tell its multiple stories.
This is the second fiction feature from Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacote, whose Run, with Abdoul Karim Konate and Isaach De Bankole, premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2014.
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