ARTE France Cinéma is backing a quartet of projects and among them, we find the new Claire Denis project that she was possibly scouting two years back. Set to star Matt Dillon, Riley Keough and her muse Isaach de Bankolé, Le Cri des Gardes is a play to film adaptation of Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs) by playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès (an artist who was among the generation of artists lost to AIDS) who passed away in 1989. The play dealt with issues of fear, dissimulation, lies, the commerce we have with guilt and bad conscience. Denis wrote the screenplay alongside Suzanne Lindon (filmmaker behind Spring Blossom) and Andrew Litvack (High Life and Stars at Noon). Production is set to begin in January/February of next year which means we could possibly see this being readied for Cannes 2026. Curiosa Films and Vixens (France), Astou Production (Senegal) are producing.
Le Cri des Gardes takes place over the course of one night, near a vast construction site in sub-Saharan Africa. Horn, the project manager, welcomes his young companion Léone, in the barracks he shares with the young and impetuous engineer Cal. A black man, Alboury, appears in front of the gate surrounding their quarters. Inflexible, lurking like a ghost in the darkness, he will remain there until they return to him the body of his brother, killed on the construction site.
