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Night of the Kings
15
Why watch?
“Coming back to Night of the Kings in the grandeur of the Picture House feels like an opportunity to revel in the film’s rich narrative as well as the strange tension between the scale of the community which feels almost like a kingdom, but also the claustrophobia that is such an inherent part of any film set inside a prison.”
Wendy Cook,
Head of Cinema
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This week's Hyde Park Pick
Spectacular, thrilling and absolutely unique, Night of the Kings is both an exhilarating tale of survival in one of the world’s most dangerous prisons and a beautiful ode to the power of storytelling.
When a young man is sent to an infamous prison, located in the middle of the Ivorian forest and ruled by its inmates, he is chosen to take part in a storytelling ritual just as a violent battle for control bubbles to the surface. After discovering the grim fate that awaits him at the end of the night, Roman begins to narrate the mystical life of a legendary outlaw to make his story last until dawn and give himself any chance of survival.
This film was selected by our programming partner, Maona Art.
Details
“With “Night of the Kings” Lacôte collapses the bounds between eras, and dissolves myth and reality, performance and remembrance, into one whole. It’s an assured, energetic piece of epic filmmaking, one that celebrates how storytelling, oration, and folklore teach us about our past so we might change our present.”
Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
“Night of the Kings proves most captivating in evoking the transformative power of the imagination”
Mark Kermode, The Guardian
“What Lacôte achieves here in his second feature, by mixing documentary and fiction styles and also genre-bending to near breaking point is remarkable. The different elements end up complementing one another and supplies the viewer with a unique cinematic experience.”
Fred Onyango, Little White Lies
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