The sound of rustling leaves is swallowed by the heavy breathing of those who run. The land is dense, but there is no stopping now. There is a place beyond the trees, a place where the enslaved live free. The girl and her father have heard stories: Some say they are nothing more than myths, whispers passed down from those who dream of freedom. But the ones who believe know the name. Mame Ngessou: a spirit who watches, one who lives in the water and hears the call of the stolen.
In Simon Moutaïrou’s Ni chaînes ni maîtres (No Chains No Masters), history and myth are inseparable. The film follows Mati and Massamba, a father and daughter enslaved on a French plantation in 1759, who flee a world where survival means submission. Beyond the plantation, the maroons—Wolof, Ashanti, others whose names have been lost to colonial records but who have made new names for themselves in the shadows—await the duo. Like Mati and Massamba, they are bound by nothing but the refusal to be owned.
This is no heroic escape, no triumphant arrival. Freedom is fragile, always one step ahead but never fully within reach. The French slave captors find them. The chase ends at the edge of a cliff. Below, the ocean stretches wide, infinite. To jump is to choose death. To surrender is to return to the chains.
The maroons make their decision. They hold hands, one by one, singing as they step forward. A woman with a child in her arms. A man who closes his eyes and steps into the abyss. The slave hunters stand frozen before an act they cannot control. Last are Mati and Massamba. They do not weep. They look at one another and step forward, hands clasped, bodies suspended for a fleeting second before finally meeting the sea.
Western narratives about slavery often follow a linear progression: suffering, endurance, and eventual liberation—either through escape, revenge, or legal justice. In 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup endures, survives, and is eventually freed. In Django Unchained, revenge is the currency of liberation. In Amistad, justice comes through legal arguments in a white courtroom. These films frame time as something that moves forward toward resolution; Ni chaînes ni maîtres offers no such resolution. This is not a film about endurance or individual redemption. It is about collective refusal.
Ni chaînes ni maîtres refuses the spatial and temporal structures imposed by Western storytelling. Moutaïrou’s film rejects the notion of a promised land entirely. Unlike Western narratives that position escape as an endpoint, Ni chaînes ni maîtres presents flight as something cyclical, unstable, and impermanent. Mati and Massamba reach the maroon community, the promised land whispered about in hushed voices. For a brief moment, it appears as though their journey has ended and freedom has been secured, but this promise is fleeting. Because their newfound refuge does not exist outside the colonial system, it is only a temporary shelter, always at risk of being found and destroyed. The illusion of stability shatters when the cycle begins again: The French captors descend, forcing them back into flight.
Moutaïrou’s film disrupts the Western cinematic expectation that escape leads to resolution; instead, freedom remains provisional, constantly deferred, never fully realized. Mati and Massamba’s leap into the ocean does not mark the end of their struggle but the final rupture of colonial time itself. This rejection of colonial time aligns with real histories: In the many maroon communities of Haiti, Brazil, and the Caribbean, enslaved people did not wait for freedom to be granted; instead, they chose to live outside the colonial state and form societies that rejected its legitimacy. It harkens back to the famed Igbo Landing (1803), where captured Igbo people walked into the sea rather than be enslaved.
Western cinema struggles with narratives that defy resolution. It demands catharsis, a singular hero, and a system to overcome, producing a binary imagination where Africa is either a spectacle of suffering or a utopian fantasy. This is the Africa of Black Panther, The Woman King, and other films that erase or distort history for entertainment. While Black Panther was widely celebrated, its Afrofuturist vision of Wakanda imagines an Africa severed from colonial histories. It is a speculative utopia—visually stunning, but removed from material realities.
When Hollywood does engage with history, it often reduces it to spectacle. Slavery narratives linger on lashings, bloodied backs, and prolonged suffering, translating Black pain into a cinematic aesthetic of endurance. The violence is stylized, eliciting emotion rather than interrogation. Whether through fantasy or suffering, Africa is stripped of its contradictions, struggles, and lived realities in favor of a clean, digestible narrative of brutality. This aestheticized suffering—a careful balancing of emotion and detachment—is what gives Hollywood’s portrayal of history its distinct sheen, one that feels immersive but never fully disruptive. The slow-motion anguish, the swelling orchestral scores, the carefully composed shots of despair move audiences, particularly non-Black viewers, without forcing them to reckon with the structures that produced such suffering. For Black audiences, these depictions can retraumatize, offering little in the way of critical confrontation. Hollywood glosses over history to contain discomfort and render brutality as sublime.
Moutaïrou’s cinematic narrative is in line with other filmmakers like Mati Diop and Alice Diop, both of whom continue to challenge the flattening of African history in film. Their movies engage in a cinematic afropology that rejects Western demands for resolution and containment. Films like Ni chaînes ni maîtres, Dahomey, and Saint Omer refuse triumphant endings, singular heroes, or clear moral takeaways. Instead, they confront history on its own terms, embracing its gaps, contradictions, and unresolved tensions. They experiment with narrative ambiguity, temporal rupture, and compositional silence as tools for historical reckoning.
Mati Diop’s Dahomey materializes these contradictions through form and dialogue. The latter half of the film shifts into a chorus of young Beninese students debating the meaning and limitations of repatriation. Their voices clash: Some emphasize the importance of reclaiming what was stolen, while others question the motivations behind the return of 26 out of the estimated 7,000 looted artifacts. The conversation touches on a loss of language and culture, the role of political leaders and whether these symbolic acts do anything to address their present-day conditions. Diop captures this dissonance without editorializing, allowing the students’ perspectives to collide, overlap, and contradict one another. Rather than offering closure, Dahomey becomes a space where postcolonial realities are laid bare—messy, unresolved, and impossible to reduce to a single meaning.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer likewise rejects a framework of moral closure. Where Hollywood might have turned the real-life case of Fabienne Kabou into a sensationalized courtroom drama, Alice Diop offers a restrained, introspective film that interrogates race, migration and the unseen violence of otherness in contemporary France. Its protagonist, Laurence Coly, a Senegalese woman accused of infanticide in France, is rendered neither victim nor villain. The film does not offer her redemption or allow easy condemnation, forcing the viewer to sit in the discomfort of the unresolved space of her existence. Like Ni chaînes ni maîtres and Dahomey, Saint Omer insists that the traumas of slavery, migration, and alienation are unresolved wounds.
At its root, Saint Omer is a film about displacement—both physical and psychological. Laurence left one world behind but has not been fully accepted into another. She is alienated by both Senegalese and French spaces. Alice Diop criticizes expectations that postcolonial subjects who immigrate should be grateful, should assimilate without friction and should leave behind the ghosts of their past. Laurence’s story exposes how assimilation is a demand—not an invitation—that requires an impossible and violent severance. Diop frames the character’s crime—drowning her own daughter—as not just an individual act of desperation but a symptom of something larger. Was it an act of mental collapse? A response to the suffocating pressure of being a Black woman in France? A rejection of the burden of representation placed on migrant mothers? Diop offers us no answers, leaving us to wonder whether it is all of these elements, or perhaps none of them at all. Her camera lingers, holding the audience in prolonged quiet moments that withhold closure, forcing us to confront ambiguity rather than escape it.
The refusal to conform to Western storytelling conventions is a political one. Ni chaînes ni maîtres, Dahomey, and Saint Omer reject the idea that history must be neatly contained, that survival equates to freedom, or that suffering must be spectacularized to be understood. By breaking away from the imposed linearity of mainstream cinema, these films open space for new ways of seeing, remembering, and resisting. They remind us that history is not a closed book, nor is it something to be repackaged for easy consumption. It lingers, unresolved, pressing against the present. Perhaps this is the greatest act of defiance—refusing to give history a conclusion.