Telling stories for survival: Philippe Lacôte on Night of the Kings

► Night of the Kings is in UK cinemas and streaming on BFI Player and other digital platforms.

The second feature by the Ivorian writer-director Philippe Lacôte, it is a highly theatrical, poetic, sometimes fantastical drama, yet is rooted directly in brutal reality, drawing on the recent history of his country and this century’s civil war.

Night of the Kings is the story of a nameless young man (Koné Bakary), sentenced to imprisonment in Abidjan’s La MACA (Abidjan House of Detention and Correction). The prison is ruled by boss inmate, or ‘dangoro’, Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu from Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables). With a power struggle brewing, Blackbeard selects the newcomer to be the prison’s ‘Roman’ – a storyteller assigned to entertain the inmates on the night of a red moon.

The role of roman is a genuine feature of La MACA life, says Lacôte, although not as dangerous as the film suggests. “You don’t necessarily get killed, but you can get beaten up if you’re not a good storyteller. A roman enjoys a special status. During the day he’s treated like a prince – he gets to have sex, he gets presents – but at night he’s the storyteller and he has to work, that’s his job.”

Together with specific references to Ivory Coast’s civil war, Lacôte’s film uses elements of fantasy, together with brief eruptions of song and dance from a prisoners’ chorus. The result is a seemingly incongruous merging of reality and myth – but, Lacôte says, “in Ivorian culture in particular and African culture generally, there’s no difference. In the West, the term is ‘magic realism’, but for us the frontier between living and dead, visible and invisible, realism and magic is practically non-existent – or at least, porous. I needed to tell this story from the point of view of the African imaginary.”

Lacôte shot his exteriors at La MACA itself, recreating its interiors in two colonial buildings – and deriving further authenticity from his casting, 25 per cent of the large ensemble being former prisoners. For the hall where the Roman performs, the director wanted to convey the impression of an arena – both a theatrical auditorium and a space of combat.

He himself has known La MACA since he was a child, when his mother was a political prisoner there. “Every prison resembles its country. In Africa, it would be unthinkable to isolate every prisoner in a separate cell, because life there happens collectively. This particular prison is very free: it has these big areas where you might have 500 prisoners in a shared living space.”

The film, says Lacôte, is a homage to the African institution of griots, traditional narrator-troubadours; his hero is the nephew of one, and essentially becomes one (literally) overnight. “They sing the praises of chiefs, kings or presidents, and they are also historians. So for us, mythology and objective history are the same thing, there’s no contradiction.”

Where political history comes into play in The Night of Kings is through references to the civil war and the arrest in 2011 of President Laurent Gbagbo. Meanwhile, Lacôte’s hero narrates the tale of a real Ivorian underworld figure, Zama King, giving his life the dimension of legend in some beautiful, distinctly fanciful sequences. The real story was less beautiful: the leader of one of the African youth gangs known as ‘microbes’ – a name inspired by Brazilian favela drama City of God (2002) – Zama became a folk hero but was killed by a mob in reprisal for his crimes in 2015.

His murder, says Lacôte, was filmed and posted on social media. “When I saw those images two years after the civil war, I couldn’t help wondering where we’d come to with violence in my country. Did it mean that, two years on, violence was still on the loose? That’s why I wanted to tell Zama’s story.”

Lead actor Koné Bakary (not to be confused with his Ivorian and Burkinabé footballer namesakes) was found during a two-year casting process, during which Lacôte recruited 40 young people – “singers, dancers, aspiring actors, martial arts practitioners” – for a two-month workshop. “Bakary nearly didn’t get chosen. He was very shy, but he was always first person to arrive at the workshop, then afterwards he’d stay behind and put the chairs away.” The actor’s hesitancy was part of the appeal, ideal for a hero only slowly discovering his inner magic – a character who “has the power of a storyteller, and doesn’t even know it.”