Vincent Meessen’s Juste un mouvement is a dense, multilayered essay film that reopens the story of Senegalese intellectual and militant Omar Blondin Diop. Diop, a Marxist revolutionary who appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, died under suspicious circumstances in a Dakar prison in 1973. Rather than retracing Diop’s biography in conventional terms, Meessen reframes his presence through the echoes he has left in Senegalese cultural, political, and intellectual life. Shot entirely in Dakar, the film mobilizes interviews, archival fragments, performative restagings, and intertitles in French, Wolof, and Chinese to build a layered political portrait of postcolonial legacy, resistance, and erasure.

While Godard’s role is critically examined rather than celebrated, the film mirrors La Chinoise’s aesthetic strategies to question the translatability of revolutionary ideology. The result is a cinematic collage that reflects on who gets remembered, how history is transmitted, and what remains unspoken in the official record. Through montage and polyphony, Juste un mouvement opens a reflective space in which contemporary Senegal becomes a lens onto global histories of dissent and complicity.