The Fence – Black Battles with Dogs

FR 2025, 107 min

Claire Denis inszeniert mit einer Starbesetzung ein Drama, das sich über 24 Stunden in Nigeria erstreckt und an ihre Klassiker CHOCOLAT und BEAU TRAVAIL anknüpft.

Synopsis

Ein großes Bauunternehmen in Westafrika. Der britische Bauleiter Horn wohnt mit seinem Kollegen Cal, ein junger Ingenieur, auf dem Gelände. Leone, Horns frisch angetraute Frau, kommt am selben Abend zu ihnen, an dem ein Mann am Zaun auftaucht. Sein Name ist Alboury und er fordert die Leiche seines Bruders, der tagsüber auf der Baustelle ums Leben gekommen ist. Er bedrängt die beiden Männer die ganze Nacht über, während die Situation aus dem Ruder gerät und Leone zusieht, wie sich das Unglück vor ihren Augen abspielt.

„So unreal here“, sagt die Frau des Projektleiters, als sie auf der Großbaustelle in der Savanne Westafrikas eintrifft. Im Gepäck eine Samttasche mit Schriftzug „Babe“, an den Füßen Stilettos, wird sie unfreiwillig einem Todesfall auf der Spur sein. Der auf dem Theaterstück „Black Battles with Dogs“ (1979) basierende Film entfaltet sich während einer Nacht an einem Schauplatz, auf dem alle Beteiligten Fremde sind. Mit ihrer Rückkehr in die Gemengelage des postkolonialen Afrika erzählt Claire Denis von Männern, die über einen toten Körper verhandeln. In Wachtürmen über ihren Köpfen besingt ein Chorus von Wachleuten einen allzu fernen Gott. - Anna Katharina Laggner, Viennale 2026

Texte zum Film

Claire Denis, in Paris geboren, verbrachte ihre Kindheit in verschiedenen afrikanischen Ländern, insbesondere in Kamerun. Nach ihrer Rückkehr nach Frankreich entdeckte sie dank eines Lehrers und des Filmclubs ihrer Schule das Kino für sich. 1973 schloss sie ihr Studium an der IDHEC ab und arbeitete als Regieassistentin an der Seite von Jacques Rivette, Robert Enrico, Costa-Gavras und Wim Wenders. An der IDHEC lernte sie Agnès Godard kennen, die ihre Kamerafrau wurde. Später arbeitete sie mit Jim Jarmusch an „Down by Law“ (1986). 1988 wurde ihr erster Film „Chocolat“, der in Kamerun gedreht wurde, im Programm der Internationalen Filmfestspiele von Cannes uraufgeführt, für den César nominiert und von der amerikanischen Filmkritik gefeiert. Es folgten mehr als zwanzig Filme, die alle auf den renommiertesten internationalen Festivals präsentiert wurden. Dazu gehören „Nénette und Boni“ (Goldener Leopard beim Locarno Film Festival 1996), „High Life“ (mit Robert Pattinson, Premiere beim Toronto International Film Festival 2018), „Both Sides of the Blade“ (Silberner Bär für die beste Regie bei den Internationalen Filmfestspielen Berlin 2022), „Stars at Noon“ (Grand Prix bei den Internationalen Filmfestspielen von Cannes 2022) und „Beau Travail“, gedreht in Dschibuti und 2022 von einer Kritikerjury des britischen Magazins „Sight and Sound“ zum siebtbesten Film aller Zeiten gekürt.

Filmografie

2025 THE FENCE (Special Presentation – Toronto IFF)
2022 STARS AT NOON (Grand Jury Prize – Cannes IFF)
2021 BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (Silver Bear for Best Director – Berlin IFF)
2018 HIGH LIFE (Fipresci Prize – San Sebastian FF, Official Selection – Toronto IFF, Official Selection – New York FF)
2017 LET THE SUNSHINE IN (SACD Prize at Directors’ Fortnight – Cannes IFF)
2013 BASTARDS (Un Certain Regard – Cannes IFF)
2010 WHITE MATERIAL (Official Competition – Venice IFF)
2008 35 SHOTS OF RUM (Out of Competition – Venice IFF)
2005 THE INTRUDER
2002 FRIDAY NIGHT
2001 TROUBLE EVERY DAY (Out of Competition – Cannes IFF)
1999 BEAU TRAVAIL (Best Cinematography – César Awards)
1996 NÉNETTE AND BONI (Golden Leopard, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Special Prize – Locarno FF)
1995 A PROPOS DE NICE
1994 U.S. GO HOME
1993 I CAN’T SLEEP (Un Certain Regard – Cannes IFF)
1990 NO FEAR, NO DIE
1989 MAN NO RUN
1988 CHOCOLAT (Official Selection – Cannes IFF Nominee Best First Feature Film – César Awards)

Preise und Festivals

- Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Lightbox) 2025
- New York Film Festival (NYFF) 2025
- San Sebastian Film Festival (SSIFF) 2025
- Viennale 2026

Weitere Texte

Interview with Claire Denis

What is your relationship with Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, and when did you decide to adapt it for cinema?

Back then, like everyone else, I went to the Amandiers Theater in Nanterre. I’d met Isaach de Bankolé and was writing my first screenplay, Chocolat, with him in mind for the role of a servant in a white family. He didn’t have much dialogue, but I knew his almost silent, lucid presence would give the film its balance, its sense of justice. Going to Nanterre was as much about seeing the plays as about running into Isaach, who was not only Bernard-Marie Koltès’s friend but, as they called each other, his “brother.” Something untouchable bound them, more than fraternity, something so solid it set them slightly apart.
I came to know Koltès through Isaach. His plays struck me as magnificent, more than most contemporary works. Black Battles with Dogs spoke to me deeply, connected to my childhood in Africa. When I directed Chocolat, Isaach invited Koltès to the shoot in Cameroon. That’s when I realized he was ill, though he never named the disease - AIDS - that was gnawing at him. After the film’s release, my ties with Isaach and Koltès continued. When I received a Villa Médicis grant to work in Portugal on a film about ivory trafficking, Michel Piccoli insisted I bring Koltès with me.
By then, he was in steep decline. He became convinced I wasn’t writing a screenplay but filming Black Battles with Dogs. I didn’t contradict him. His brother and mother came to take him back to Paris, and ten days later he died. Even in the hospital, he told me I absolutely had to finish the film. I never dared say no.
For a long time, out of fear, I resisted the idea. I’d seen Patrice Chéreau’s production and regretted that Isaach hadn’t played Alboury. Slowly, I convinced myself I had to honor Bernard-Marie’s wish.

Why did you decide to shoot in English?

Bernard spent some time in Nigeria, where he was more or less well received on a construction site. In Nigeria, in Ghana, in western Cameroon, English is spoken between whites and Blacks. And I find that politeness is more audible in English. I mean that excessive politeness which heightens distance and carries mockery. “Sir” snaps like a slap in the face, more so than “monsieur,” I think.
I'd have liked to shoot in Nigeria or in Cameroon, but that had become impossible for us. Still, I kept English in order to stay close to everything I had imagined before having to change countries.
In the film, the character played by Isaach de Bankolé speaks Yoruba with the guards. It’s a fairly widespread language in West Africa—in Côte d’Ivoire, in Nigeria, for example. It is Isaach’s mother tongue.

Besides the language, how does the film differ from the play?

I wanted to stay close to the play, especially the excessive politeness between Horn and Alboury. This politeness is angry, frustrated, sometimes even hateful. It itself marks a boundary - a fence.
But I did make the characters younger. In Chéreau’s stage production, they were played by older actors (Michel Piccoli, Sidiki Bakaba, Miriam Boyer, Philippe Léotard).
It also seemed important to make Léone more modern. I couldn’t portray a woman as fearful and ignorant as Léone is in the play. It was impossible to imagine her looking at Alboury and suddenly falling in love with the first Black man she ever saw.

Koltès’s play, with its themes of vengeance and sacrifice, has echoes of classical tragedy. How much did that shape your approach to directing the film?

Alboury is the driving force of the tragedy. By coming to claim his brother’s body - as in Greek tragedy - he unsettles the three white characters on the other side of the fence. Not because he is Black, but because he demands justice.
I always knew it was a tragedy, and what mattered to me was finding an abandoned site where I could build a fortress of fencing and barbed wire. That setup had to be respected, just as in the theater. I imposed on myself the constraints of a closed space.

How did you preserve the unity of time and space from the play?

I thought a lot about the unity of time, because it meant a very demanding schedule for the crew. Working at night was complicated and exhausting, but it also shielded us from the outside world. We were captives in this one place, in the night. I think that brought us much closer to Koltès’s play.

Did it make you want to shoot in chronological order?

I’d never done that before. My assistant Jean-Paul Allègre worked out a schedule that allowed it. We filmed all the daytime scenes first - the airport, the bulldozers - and then everything else in chronological order, at night, right through to dawn on the final day.

How did you decide on the four actors - Isaach de Bankolé, Mia McKenna - Bruce, Matt Dillon, and Tom Blyth?

I told Isaach about the project early on, and he waited two years. I already knew Matt Dillon, a friend of Isaach’s. I ran into him by chance one day in Paris. He reminded me he had long wanted us to work together. I gave him an early draft of the screenplay, and he immediately said yes, even though the project was still vague.
The hardest part was casting Léone. My first choice was an actress who became pregnant and couldn’t do the film. The casting director introduced me to several American actresses until I met Mia McKenna - Bruce, who lives in England. From our first video call, I was immediately taken with her, and she imposed herself as the obvious choice, despite her age. She had the rare ability to embody exactly the woman I had envisioned. Working with her felt completely natural.
That left Cal. The production wanted a big name, which made it complicated. At first, I couldn’t find the right fit. Then the casting director mentioned Tom Blyth, who, like Mia, is British and young. Opposite Matt Dillon, it felt right that both would keep their British accents.

What was the atmosphere like on set?

As Koltès’s brother, Isaach watched over the film - the project’s guardian.
Matt and Isaach already knew each other well and rehearsed together during the day. Mia and Tom bonded right away. We were all in the same small hotel, constantly crossing paths. They formed a solid quartet, a team alongside ours. They came to set every day at the same hours, even when they weren’t shooting. Nothing escaped anyone.
The same went for the French and Senegalese crew. I think the Senegalese technicians truly enjoyed making the film and felt attached to the story. Bringing everyone together was wonderful.

Bernard-Marie Koltès traveled to Nigeria before writing “Black Battles with Dogs”, yet he specified that the play could just as well take place in the suburbs of Paris. To what extent do Koltès’s work and your film depict a metaphorical Africa?

When Koltès was in Cameroon during the shoot of Chocolat, he told me about his trip to Nigeria. He had witnessed the brutality that ruled over construction sites. That brutality was already present in Quai Ouest and In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields. There was the same violent dynamic between people of different races.
Black Battles with Dogs can be read as a fable about the evils of neocolonialism. Yet Koltès denied writing an activist play and rejected dogmatism. For him, theater was above all a space for poetry, ambivalence, and ambiguity.

Yes, and for me this ambiguity is neither artificial nor prefabricated.

Where does the political dimension of the film lie? In its relationship to the Other?

Yes, that’s what I saw in the play from the start, and again when I reread it. But the phrase “relationship to the Other” has become a cliché.
The film is about an encounter built on desire, hatred, and frustration among three men and a woman divided by everything.

The film revolves around this dividing line, this small battleground split in two, where an age-old tragedy unfolds. Did you want to show what separates human beings, and also what unites them, for the space of a single night?

When Horn tells Alboury, “Your brother, your brother, that’s all you can talk about,” it’s as if the word were foreign to him. He can’t grasp its meaning, yet he experiences it with Cal. Perhaps it’s a kind of brotherhood bordering on love.
Alboury’s response to Léone, when she asks what he thinks of her, is very powerful: “a coin that fell on the ground, that shines for no one.” That line sums up so much of what Koltès wrote. There’s no point in being here if we don’t emit at least a little light.

Does The Fence respond to a desire to shoot in Africa again, after Chocolat, Beau Travail, and White Material?

The Fence responds above all to a promise I made to Koltès. I needed to find in Africa a landscape that made the play geographically credible. That’s why I added daytime scenes with the herds of zebu. The African setting had to exist outside the construction site at night. It couldn’t just be barbed wire - there also had to be life around it.
In the play, Horn says his wife arrived by taxi. I thought showing her stepping off a plane and driving in would make her feel more alive.

Where did you shoot the film?

In Senegal. At first, I considered Equatorial Africa - not Nigeria, which was too dangerous - but Kinshasa or Cameroon, where there were construction sites. In the end, a co- production with Senegal was possible, which greatly helped the film. Senegal is transforming rapidly, with many highway and port projects. Alice Diop’s partner, who knows the country well, told me about a coastal site shut down for three years by fishermen, because the port would block their boats. I found an empty lot there with a few elements but no real structures. We set up in the middle of nowhere, disturbing no one.
When we started shooting, work on the site resumed. Luckily, we filmed at night, crossing paths with the workers. Building the set was a key moment for the Franco-Senegalese crew. It was hard work, but fascinating. We used shipping containers. As the real site came back to life, workers asked if we could build watchtowers for them too. A kind of companionship grew on that vast site, destined to become a double port and gas terminal.

The red earth, from the very first shot, plays an important role. It is in this soil - the crucible of spilled blood - that the tragedy of the film takes root.

The red earth of Nigeria was central in the play. Senegal’s soil is more yellow and sandy, but there are laterite quarries that produce red clay. I found laterite all over the abandoned site. When it rains it becomes viscous, but it also makes the ground solid for building.

From concrete elements - the earth, the abandoned construction site, the bulldozers, the barracks - you create an atmosphere that is dreamlike, psychological, almost supernatural. How did you and cinematographer Éric Gautier approach the film visually, given that it unfolds almost entirely at night?

With Éric, we imagined the powerful road lamps mentioned in the play, when Alboury says, “Your lights are too strong for me. They hurt my eyes.” We also worked with softer lighting inside the house, powered by a generator. We thought a lot about how to create night images with very little light. We even considered film, but in the end chose digital, with a specific color grading.

Why did you change the title, both in French and in English? Koltès wrote: “At night, the guards, to keep themselves from falling asleep, would call out to one another with strange sounds made in their throats… It went on without end. That was what made me decide to write this play: the cry of the guards.”

The play was translated into English as Black Battles with Dogs, since the word nègre is no longer acceptable. I decided not to use that title, which doesn’t suit Koltès at all. I considered The Fence, and I kept the nightmare sequence with the dog. But in French, La Clôture (The Fence) didn’t appeal to me.
The Cry of the Guards defines a nocturnal space. By day, there is no need to cry out. It was the same in medieval European cities, when night watchmen would call, “It is eleven o’clock, good people! Sleep, the night watch is awake!” As if people needed to be accompanied through the night.

Interview by Olivier Père in Paris on Monday, August 11, 2025

Credits

Regie
Claire Denis
Buch
Andrew Litvack, Suzanne Lindon, Claire Denis
Nach dem Theaterstück "Black Battles with Dogs" von Bernad-Marie Koltes
Mit
Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blyth, Brian Begnan, Moussa Thiam
Director of Photography
Eric Gautier
Musik
Tindersticks
Schnitt
Guy Lecorne
Szenenbild
Thierry Flamand, Oumar Sall
Kostümbild
Anthony Vaccarello (künstlerische Leitung), Judy Shrewsbury, Olivier Beriot, Khady Ngom
Tonmischung
Jean-Paul Mugel
Produktion
Vixens, Curiosa Films, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Arte France Cinema
In Zusammenarbeit mit
Goodfellas
Les Films du Losange
Weltpremiere
10.9.2025, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Lightbox)
Kinostart (DE)
10.12.2025

Kinoverleih-Infos

Ab 10.12. im Verleih von Filmgalerie 451 im Kino

Bildformat
2:39
Ton
5.1