Black Spirit
2018 · 21m · Tunisia
Directed by Chakib Taleb-Bendiab
Genres: adventure, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
An aging French archaeologist ventures into the Tunisian Sahara convinced he is on the trail of the 'Black Spirits' — a legendary clan of African samurai descended from Yasuke. His mystic quest blurs the line between genuine discovery and an escape from a reality he refuses to accept.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with Yasuke as a symbol, but Taleb-Bendiab does something weirder—he buries the legend under a collapsing archaeologist's fever dream, refusing the clean narrative payoff entirely. It's aggressively uncommercial in the best way: a mystical quest that might just be a man's delusion, and the film doesn't flinch from that ambiguity.
The formal architecture here is what matters: the black-and-white/color oscillation isn't decoration but a structural argument about the distance between scholarly fact and mythic need, echoing a lineage from Roeg and Tarkovsky while remaining entirely its own meditation. Shot across the actual desert with this kind of restraint and visual precision, it's the work of a director fluent in cinema's relationship to time and landscape.
That decision to stage the entire mythological apparatus—the four elements, the samurai echoes, the whole spiritual quest—across genuine Tunisian geography rather than constructed sets transforms what could be art-film indulgence into something tactile and earned. One specific choice: the way the color sequences bleed *into* black-and-white rather than cutting, making the dream and reality viscerally permeable on a technical level that justifies every minute of runtime.
Reviews
Sur les traces de la légende des Samouraïs africains — un esprit vagabond entre le rêve et le réel.
Esprit vagabond — le court métrage de Chakib Taleb-Bendiab célèbre la rencontre entre la sagesse japonaise et l'Afrique.
Festivals
- Sapporo International Short Film Festival and Market 2018, Programmers Delight Award
- Woodstock Film Festival 2018, Best Short Film (nominee)
- Festival of Time 2018, Best Short Film
- Satisfied Eye International Film Festival 2018, Best Cinematography
- FICA — Festival International du Cinéma d'Alger 2018