In Ulrich K\u00f6hler\u2019s New York Film Festival<\/a> world premiere \u201cGavagai,\u201d a filmmaker and her star are taken to task for making a reverse-engineered \u201cMedea\u201d in Senegal.<\/p>\n The Euripides play, about a woman who murders her own children as a tribute to the man she loves and is obsessed with, is here recast as a story of a white woman (Maren Eggert, playing the actress in the film within the film) ostracized by a Black African community \u2014 and in a movie-within-the-movie directed by a filmmaker (Nathalie Richard) who looks curiously like Claire Denis<\/a>. (The director said, in a conversation with IndieWire, that this is pure coincidence.) Meanwhile, at that film\u2019s Berlin Film Festival premiere, its star Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) is in freefall after a racially troubling run-in with a Polish hotel security heavy.<\/p>\n More from IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n K\u00f6hler is a filmmaker whose partner, in real life, is Maren Ade<\/a>, the writer\/director of films including the Oscar-nominated screwball classic \u201cToni Erdmann\u201d and the breakup drama \u201cEveryone Else.\u201d As K\u00f6hler explained to IndieWire, the two collaborate and give feedback on each other\u2019s films. \u201cGavagai\u201d is not quite a comedy, not quite a drama, not quite an industry satire, with a tone that is ever-shifting from the comedic to the privilege-interrogating serious. It\u2019s one of a handful of world premieres at the New York Film Festival, and a movie that will delight insiders and festival-goers for its sharp critique of how movies are delivered into the world: K\u00f6hler shot the film during the actual Berlin Film Festival, and uses its headquarters as grounds for an inquiry into the charged landscape of who-gets-to-direct-what filmmaking questions in 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about something very serious at the base, but its protagonists are all privileged people, so the fallout from what happens is psychologically tough, but they will not end up in the street,\u201d K\u00f6hler said. \u201cIn this setting, with actors and a director as the main protagonists, I felt I could do what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n K\u00f6hler previously directed the film \u201cSleeping Sickness,\u201d which he shot in Cameroon, and experiences from that movie shooting in Africa led to this one. \u201cThe central scene in Berlin, the racial-profiling scene, is something that really happened during the premiere of \u2018Sleeping Sickness,’\u201d K\u00f6hler said of \u201cGavagai,\u201d referring to an incident that happened with that film\u2019s star (and this one\u2019s), Jean-Christophe Folly. \u201cThe white savior who went over the top out of guilt was me,\u201d the director said, whereas in \u201cGavagai,\u201d Maren Eggert\u2019s character, the film-within-the-film\u2019s lead, rushes to Nourou\u2019s aid once a Polish security detail asks him for his ID but no one else\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cThe security guy who started the whole thing was a Polish guy who didn\u2019t speak German very well, and with whom Jean-Christophe and later me got into a fight,\u201d K\u00f6hler said. \u201cThe one who suffered most by this was obviously Jean-Christophe because his festival experience, and the fact that this was his first feature film with a major role that was playing in an a festival in competition, he didn\u2019t really get to enjoy that because that guy and the hotel politics destroyed his experience. But then, also, I added to that, thinking I would help him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Gavagai\u2019NYFF<\/p>\n As for the director Caroline Lescot\u2019s (Nathalie Richard) likeness to Claire Denis \u2014 herself a filmmaker who has interrogated colonialism throughout her career, from \u201cWhite Material\u201d to \u201c35 Shots of Rum\u201d \u2014 K\u00f6hler said it was \u201cnot intentional. I found it more interesting to have a female director than a male. For me, she\u2019s an alter-ego. But I found it more interesting than just having the usual old white man behaving badly. It seemed like a more complex [situation]. Especially with \u2018Medea\u2019 as the film within the film. For me, you could say that Caroline is really taking it on from a feminist perspective, and kind of not really thinking through the racial issues involved in turning around history, and having a white Medea rejected by African people.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a scene in the film in which Caroline is grilled at a press conference about her implications in rewriting the Euripides text, and she quotes James Baldwin, which isn\u2019t helpful for the demanding press corps. \u201cShe references Baldwin\u2019s text about being the first Black person in a Swiss village, and he explains pretty well why it\u2019s not the same as when a white person, from a position of power and privilege, arrives in an African village that hasn\u2019t seen any white person before, it\u2019s a very different situation from a Black man arriving in a village in Europe,\u201d K\u00f6hler said.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope I haven\u2019t behaved all that badly, but I think the pressure situation that filmmakers, authors are under is quite tough with the economic restraints and also with always having to justify yourself because maybe you\u2019re not making movies that make a lot of money, but you\u2019re still asking for a lot,\u201d K\u00f6hler said. \u201cI don\u2019t think you will find many directors who would say they are not capable of that kind of behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n As for K\u00f6hler\u2019s collaboration with Ade, who is the first person to see a rough cut of his films, he said, \u201cWhen we didn\u2019t have children, it was much more intense. Now it\u2019s about really finding time to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Ulrich K\u00f6hler\u2019s New York Film Festival world premiere \u201cGavagai,\u201d a filmmaker and her star are taken to task for making a reverse-engineered \u201cMedea\u201d in Senegal. The Euripides play, about a woman who murders her own children as a tribute to the man she loves and is obsessed with, is here recast as a story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2052420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[374079,360206,373964,381301,157636,381300,381302,381303,381297,381298,381299],"class_list":["post-2052419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-berlin-film-festival","tag-claire-denis","tag-filmmaker","tag-gavagai","tag-indiewire","tag-jean-christophe","tag-jean-christophe-folly","tag-maren-ade","tag-maren-eggert","tag-nathalie-richard","tag-ulrich-kohler"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\u2018Gavagai-Rewrites-\u2018Medea-as-a-Portrait-of-Racial-Cluelessness-in.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2052419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2052419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2052419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2052420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2052419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2052419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2052419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n