Page - 143 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Festival Review: 35th Fribourg International Film Festival | 143www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 143–148 Baldassare Scolari Festival Review 35th Fribourg International Film Festival At this year’s Festival International de Films de Fribourg (FIFF, 16–25 July 2021), the artistic director, Thierry Jobin, and his team presented a rich and varied selection in the international competition for feature films. The twelve films dealt with diverse subjects using different stylistic approaches and narrative strategies. This diversity was also reflected in the evaluations of the juries for this category, which all awarded their prizes to different films. Nonetheless, recurring topics can be clearly identified.* In the first place, several films tell stories of petty criminals, disenfran- chised, exploited and excluded people. La Nuit des Rois (Night of the Kings, CI/FR/CA/SN 2020) by Philippe Lacôte, winner of the main award given by the International Jury, is a special kind of “prison film”. It leads us into the world of the MACA, a notorious Ivorian prison that is ruled by its inmates. Its title immediately suggests that this film is also about power games and intrigues, the struggle for authority and sovereignty: La Nuit des Rois is the French trans- lation of the title of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Lacôte’s production shifts the power struggle – one of the trademarks of Shakespeare’s dramas – to a prison, a place where hierarchies and power dynamics are abundantly clear. In this prison, a complicated system of unwritten rules, sanctions and rituals regulates the retention of power and assigns to each prisoner a specific place and a specific function in the prison community. One of these rules states that a weakened sovereign who is incapable of governing must give up power and take his own life, reminding of the figure of the god-king, described by the anthropologist James Frazer, who must be ritually killed as soon as his divine effectiveness threatens to be diminished by age or illness. DOI: 10.25364/05.7:2021.2.9 * I would like to thank the members of the Ecumenical Jury (Collette Kalt, Claude Jeanne Sury Bonicci, and Claire Zombas) and the members of the COMUNDO youth jury (Héloïse Clément, Camille Diethelm, Sardar Ebrahimi, Timy Hürlimann, Samuel Pochon, Federica Sciacca) for their insights and the stimulating conversations. The author is solely responsible for any errors of interpretation.