The best Akonio Dolo’s movies

Marie has had a tough childhood ever since her mother Elisa committed suicide. She has spent most of her life in an orphanage and now makes a living as a small time criminal in Paris. Now she wants to unravel her past and find her father whom she blames for her mother's death.

L'Etat Sauvage is based on the novel by Georges Conchon which won the highly esteemed Prix de Goncourt. The story chronicles the mindless racism of both the departing French colonial overlords and the emergent black Africans in a newly emerging African state. Laurence (Marie-Christine Barrault) suffers the outrage of her white acquaintances, including her former lover Gravenoir (Claude Brasseur) and her ex-husband Avit (Jacques Dutronc), for her affair with Patrice Doumbe (Doura Mane), an official in the new government. He in turn is ridiculed by his fellow cabinet ministers for stepping out with a white woman. The vilification escalates to such a point that Patrice is brutally murdered, and Laurence barely escapes the country alive, with the help of her ex-husband Avit.

The film Soleil Ô, shot over four years with a very low budget, tells the story of a black immigrant who makes his way to Paris in search of “his Gaul ancestors”. This manifesto denounces a new form of slavery: The immigrants desperately seek work, a place to live, but find themselves face to face with indifference, rejection, humiliation…until the final call for uprising. “Soleil Ô” is the title of a West Indian song that tells of the pain of the black people from Dahomey (now Benin) who were taken to the Caribbean as slaves.