At a film casting call, two women meet and become mother and daughter in front of the camera: Gloria and Nour. And the family grows before our eyes. Together with other actors and non-professionals, they celebrate a lavish wedding in Paris and travel to Guinea-Bissau to say goodbye to the head of their family. Between these two rituals—between Europe and West Africa, life and death, past and present—true stories intertwine with fictional narratives.

What follows is a grand celebration of life: a circular dance of love and pain, of joy and letting go. Dao is more than just a film—it is a boundless family into whose embrace we fall and by whose strength we are carried.

Dao premiered in competition at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

Gomis’s whirling, incandescent emotional epic avoids pat, sentimental homilies about family, identity or saudade: In “Dao,” home isn’t just where the heart is, but where it’s been, and been broken, leaving a messy, international trail of fragments. - Variety