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The Pirogue(La pirogue)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France, Senegal, Germany · 2012
1h 27m
Director Moussa Touré
Starring Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Laïty Fall, Malamine Drame, Balla Diarra
Genre Drama

Baye Laye, captain of a fishing pirogue, is asked to take thirty men from Dakar to Spain. Along the journey, tensions arise due to language and cultural barriers between the travelers, and the group struggles to balance morality with their desperation for a better life.

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What are critics saying?

70

Village Voice by

For all the tense interpersonal conflicts and the inevitable, if thrilling, stormy-seas set piece, what proves most striking are the exactly rendered little moments.

90

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

The most powerful thing about The Pirogue is the way it deals with emotionally charged events matter-of-factly, rather than melodramatically. The story Mr. Touré has chosen to tell is both painfully specific - about these individuals, in this boat - and immeasurably vast, since the experience it depicts is shared by millions of people around the world. And yet somehow he gets the scale just right.

38

Slant Magazine by Calum Marsh

Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.

60

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

There's enough filmmaking talent evident throughout that you wish the journey were more satisfying overall.

70

NPR by Mark Jenkins

The Pirogue spends only about an hour on open water, but that's enough to convey the risks that make the trip foolish, and the desperation that makes it inevitable.

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