Page - 144 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

144 | Baldassare Scolari www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 143–148 In the film, the sovereign’s (lack of) power is closely linked with the pow- er of storytelling. In fact, the rules of the MACA state that the sovereign can choose a storyteller who has to entertain all occupants with a story on the nights when the moon turns red. If the story displeases or ends before sunrise, the narrator is killed. Barbe Noire, the terminally ill sovereign of the MACA, invokes this rule when he appoints the pickpocket Zama as a story- teller to gain time and postpone his own fatal deposition. Zama is clearly reminiscent of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, a figure that Lacôte combines with the West African figure of the griot, a profession- al singer, poet and instrumentalist who recites epic texts in a specific form of singing as a professional singer, storyteller, teacher or entertainer. When Zama learns that he will be killed as soon as his story ends, he begins to expand the plot with flashbacks. What began as a realistic story about a petty criminal gradually turns into a fairy tale. Zama’s story offers the director the opportunity to escape the walls of the prison and bring the vast landscapes of West Africa onto the screen, where real events merge with myths and legends. What is unique in Lacôte’s film is the back and forth between a primary narrative space and secondary narrated spaces. In- deed, what Zama tells is not only visualized with the help of flashbacks but also staged performatively and physically by the inmates. For Zama and the other prisoners, voice and body become means of spiritual (admittedly only temporary) escape from their precarious circumstances. The power of narrative and fictionality is also at the center of Zheltaya Koshka (Yellow Cat, KZ/FR 2020) by director Zheltaya Koshowa. In this tragi - comic, sometimes absurd work, whose characters are at times reminis- cent of those from Aki Kaurismäki’s early films, the former criminal Kermek dreams of building a cinema in the middle of the mountains of the Kazakh steppe. The film is also an homage to, if not a remake of, Tony Scott’s True Romance (US 1993): in Zheltaya Koshka too, a cinephile protagonist falls in love with a prostitute, comes into possession of a considerable amount of money (or cocaine in Scott’s film) owned by the local gangster boss, and escapes with his lover. There are many references to film history in Zhel- taya Koshka – for example, the characters recreate Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (FR/IT 1967), Martin Scorsese’s Casino (US 1995) and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (US 1952). For Kermek and his beloved Eva, cinematographic fictionality is not just a place of refuge where the hard- ships of life in the Kazakh steppe become bearable. Rather, fictionality is a means of resistance against inhumanity and mutual exploitation in a society