A wedding in France and a funeral service in Guinea-Bissau: through these two rituals, director Alain Gomis combines family memory with collective history and cinematic fiction in Dao, spanning between Europe and West Africa, life and death, past and present. The film tells the story of a generation that lives between different places and memories. At its core is the question of what remains when families are scattered across continents—what stories are told? And which remain unspoken for large amounts of time?

The title Dao is inspired by Taoist ideas and stands for a continuous, circling river of life that embodies the balance of opposites such as birth and death, migration and homeland, fiction and reality. Professional and non-professional actors—including members of Gomis’s own family—improvised on set as part of situations that were left deliberately open. The result is an immersive epic that chooses to embody rather than merely explain the film’s core philosophy: a collective act of remembrance, affirmation of life, and self-assurance. People gather, tell stories, remember, and together invent new forms of living with one another.

After its world premiere in the competition of the Berlinale 2026, Dao celebrates its German theatrical release premiere with this screening at HKW, in the presence of director Alain Gomis.