Grigris

Grigris, a crippled young man from Burkina Faso, earns his living with spectacular dance performances in nightclubs. But it isn’t enough to pay the doctor’s bills for his stepfather. Like a cornered cat, Grigris - a beautiful role by the debutant Souleymane Démé - makes increasingly strange leaps; he begs for illegal jobs with the local Mafia boss Moussa, whom he then manages to turn against him when he falls in love with the nightclub hostess Mimi - a debut by Anaïs Monory.
Grigris is a smooth combination of an outsider melodrama and a smuggled crime thriller and is filled with African rituals. It’s the fifth feature film by the French Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. The film, with refined music by the Senegalese Wasis Diop and beautifully shot by Antoine Héberlé, was submitted on behalf of the Republic of Chad for the Oscar for Best Foreign-language Film.