THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
It is always pleasant to be surprised by a film by a stranger, to discover, at the turn of a first feature film, the promises of a budding filmmaker. This is the case here with this Sand seller, by Steve Achiepo, who combines the virtues of a documented film on a lackluster social practice – both widespread and little known (the sleep merchants) – and aesthetic quality, without renouncing either the sense of the romantic.
Djo (Moussa Mansaly, perfect in his character), hothead and big friendly guy, gets out of jail and juggles his life between a thousand hassles. A delivery man in a company run by a community semi-mafia baptized “the Colonel”, he tries to get back on his feet, still lives with his mother in a crowded apartment devoted to solidarity between natives, and houses his little girl there in conditions that displease him. his ex-wife, Aurore (Ophélie Bau), who also works as a social worker. When her aunt Félicité (Aïssa Maïga) and her children arrive in France, fleeing the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and finding themselves in the greatest destitution, her life will become a little more complicated.
Deeming it impossible to lodge her decently with her mother, no longer having the courage to leave her for even one night in a Parisian foster home, where all the misery in the world meets in a terrible promiscuity, he will finally meet, through the “Colonel”, Yvan (Benoît Magimel), a character who seems to know the real estate market like the back of his hand and who, while doing a lucrative business, occasionally comes to helping people in need. This is at least what Djo understands of his activity, who enters his service to manage his clandestine rentals.
misery of the world
In doing so, believing he is both helping people who would otherwise find themselves at the mercy of the streets, promoting his own career and making his lifestyle more expensive, Djo puts his finger in a spiral that can only be fatal. Steve Achiepo, who has seriously studied his file, reconstructs through these three characters the structure of this sinister sleep market. Men of good will, like Djo, who, more or less naively, redeem their conscience because they help others. The mafiosos, who, like “the Colonel”, exploit their people without the shadow of either morality or conscience. Traffic managers, who, like Yvan, cynically pull the strings by optimizing goods. Magimel, once again masterful, interprets in this case a perverse character, two-sided, a minor civil servant in the shadows with fallacious speech on the one hand, an odious gambler enriched on the misery of the world on the other.
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