Simon Moutaïrou Pushes Boundaries With Studiocanal-Backed French Slavery Drama ‘No Chains, No Masters’ + First Int’l Deals

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EXCLUSIVE: French screenwriter and director Simon Moutaïrou spent summers as a teenager in his father’s native country of Benin in West Africa.

Etched on his memory from this time are the trips to its so-called slave coast and port city of Ouidah, through which more than one million Africans passed in the 18th and early 19th centuries ahead of being transported overseas for a life of slavery. “There is an enormous red brick arch commemorating these deportations, ‘The Door of No Return’,” says Moutaïrou. “I couldn’t get my head around this idea of such inequality between people, or human beings being treated like animals.

When my father or uncles talked to me about what had happened, my adolescent spirit couldn’t fathom it … but it always stayed in the back of my mind.” Some 20 years on, Moutaïrou’s feature directorial debut No Chains, No Masters is making waves in France as the first local production in decades to tackle the country’s involvement in the slave trade. “There have been dozens of films about slavery out of America but very few out of France, two or three maybe, and then 30 years ago,” he comments.

Set in Mauritius in the early 19th century, when the Indian Ocean Island was under French rule, No Chains, No Masters lays bare the brutal treatment of imported African slaves working on its sugar plantations, but also offers a universal tale of resistance in the face of oppression.