French Film Festival: Hope – Immigration and Prostitution

During the French Film Festival, another film that was shown was titled Hope. This film illustrated many themes, the most noticeable of which were immigration and prostitution.

While this film is not completely a true story, it is based off of events and stories that the director had collected. Additionally, the impact was much greater as the director did not pick “real actors”, nor was the script fully written. Instead, the actors were chosen and simply told to act as they would in the situation, using words from their own dialects, something that felt natural and was not simply mechanically orchestrated.

Following Léonard, a man from the Congo, and Hope, a Nigerian woman, the film shows how they embark on the path to Europe together, hoping to enter a new life.

The movie illustrates the dangers of traversing many countries, highlighted by the ghettos. When Hope enters the Congolese ghetto with Léonard, not only does she face the difference of language, but must pay more to stay there. In order to compensate for this difference and pay Léonard back, she becomes a prostitute not only within the ghetto, but also the nearby city to earn more.

This movie showed the reality of the dangers in a real light through the lens of the people themselves. While the director and screenwriter, Boris Lojkine, is French, the actors, people who had gone through the process of illegally immigrating themselves were allowed artistic license. This made the movie that much realistic and distanced the element of the western world from the feature, elements that feature in other movies.

Hope Trailer: http://frenchfilmfestival.us/2016-hope