The double elephant in the room
French director Caroline Lescot (Nathalie Richard) is making a new adaptation of the classic tragedy “Medea”. However, the story about an abandoned ex-princess who kills her own children out of desperation does not take place in ancient Greece this time, but on the Senegalese Atlantic coast. Her actors are mostly locals, only her Medea and her Jason are embodied by the white German Maja (Maren Eggert) and Nourou Cissokho (Jean-Christophe Folly), who is of Senegalese origin but has been living and working in Paris for a long time with a French passport.
In anti-colonialist times, this combination naturally raises questions – and so a few months later, when her “Medea” adaptation finally celebrated its world premiere at the Berlinale, the director herself spoke of the “elephant in the room” in a press conference. By the way, only to shortly afterwards, in a surprising, downright surreal moment, sit with floppy ears and a trunk in front of the – of course almost exclusively white – cultural journalists who were pestering her with questions.
Pachyderms everywhere you look
This is the elephant in the movie. But on the meta level, the same pachyderm has also spread: After all, like the fictional Caroline Lescot, the very real Ulrich Köhler (“Sleeping Sickness”) is a white European director who, with his cinema business satire “Gavagai”, made a film with tons of black extras on the Senegalese Atlantic coast predominantly white or at least European protagonists discuss what is racism and what is not.
If you want to be mean, you could accuse Köhler of a certain cowardice, because he fends off all accusations in this direction by ironically addressing them all himself in the film-within-a-film press conference. But that would definitely be too short-sighted, because the revealing moments in “Gavagai” are simply too scalpel-sharply observed and biliously prepared for that.
Suddenly the director turns into an elephant alongside Medea actress Maja (Maren Eggert).
While proofreading this article, I realized that I misspelled the title “Gavagai” in a shockingly variety of ways (I hope it's correct everywhere now). But actually that's not surprising at all, because after all it's a fantasy word that the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine invented precisely to talk about the difficulty of naming something precisely. In his example it is a linguist observing a local. He points to a rabbit hopping past and says that very word. The obvious conclusion: “Gavagai” means “rabbit”!
But if you think about it, the phrase you picked up could have all sorts of other meanings – from “Look at that!” to “Something’s hopping there!” However, the word whose possible meanings are illuminated in “Gavagai” is not an artificial expression, but the real term “racism”. Although this is often similarly difficult to grasp, at least at its edges: in the very first scene, Caroline completely freaks out because her child actors (have to) wear life jackets on Medea's motorboat. But the sons have already been killed by their mother at this point in the film – and corpses don't wear water wings!
Most of those involved on the set are black – but when the “most important” names are later shown in the opening credits, almost all of them still come from (white) Europeans.
Is this another creatively angry director who sees her vision in danger? Or is that already racism? Because wouldn't it be immediately clear to everyone when it comes to white children in Europe that they can't be chugged around in a motorboat without safety devices while filming a film? But there is hardly any time to think about such topics on the chaotic beach set: Because the planned duration of filming that day is exceeded because of the life jacket problem, the extras begin to rebel – they demand that they get chicken legs from the catering buffet like the rest of the team. Caroline then hands them the entire tray over the barrier. A pragmatic, conciliatory gesture that at the same time conjures up associations with animal feeding.
Things are even more complex with Nourou: Later, he is the only one asked for his ID in the luxury hotel in Berlin, which leads to a serious scandal. In the Senegalese hotel, on the other hand, it was natural for him to simply leave the room attendant who he had called over and who was obviously very stressed out in order to make a phone call instead, as if she had nothing else to do. It is absolutely astonishing the density with which Ulrich Köhler creates such meaningful and ambiguous moments, without his film ever seeming flat or too thesis-like. Quite the opposite: “Gavagai” is pleasantly fast-paced and – especially for Berlinale connoisseurs – always incredibly funny. A film that you can then discuss endlessly, but which doesn't feel like work when you watch it, but is consistently entertaining, entertaining and with extreme bite.
Conclusion: Mercilessly well observed – and often hilarious too!
We saw “Gavagai” at the Hamburg Film Festival 2025.