Open Mic Solitaire

In Open Mic Solitaire (Solitaire au Micro Ouvert), a young Black Parisian is murdered by skinheads in Paris. Mad with despair and armed with a pistol, Mathieu (Serge Ubrette), the brother of the deceased, and his girlfriend Karin (Marilyn Canto) hijack a radio station popular with the city’s Franco-Caribbean community. Mathieu takes to the air to deliver a searing monologue on the passivity of the West Indian community in the face of white racism. Soon Mathieu’s treatise has encompassed the whole of Europe’s ransacking of Africa, the failed promises of postcolonialism, and the smokescreen of Black bourgeois respectability. Laou uses the radio address to deliver a stunning portrait of life across the banlieues, but as Mathieu’s audience becomes riveted, he and Karin are growing more and more desperate… – Steve Macfarlane