Dancing with Le Pen
2018 · 22m · United States
Directed by Nora Mandray
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A character-driven look at France's far-right National Front during the 2017 presidential election, tracing the party's decades-long rise through its supporters and archival footage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a polemic about Le Pen to scream and point; Mandray instead builds something colder and more insidious, letting the archive speak without narration—which somehow makes the rise feel inevitable rather than shocking, and I genuinely don't know if that's brilliant or dangerous.
The film's rigor lies in its refusal of easy moral distance: by interweaving supporter testimony with decades of archival footage, Mandray positions the viewer inside the party's own narrative logic, a formal choice that recalls the essay-film lineage of Marker and Farocki while asking something harder of the audience than conventional documentary polemic.
The crucial decision is the sound design—voices and period music layered over silent archival footage, never letting you settle into passive spectatorship—and it's that particular choice of what to amplify and what to leave mute that transforms a political subject into something genuinely unsettling on a sensory level.
Reviews
It's a pithy, sobering look at the sustained tolerance for bigotry and xenophobia in France, but viewers recognize the mindsets of Trump followers who sound like Mandray's subjects.