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Divine carcasse retraces the fate of an old Peugeot that arrives in Cotonou, Benin. There, the car is passed on from one owner to the next. The film accompanies every owner throughout daily life. First, there’s Simon, who moves in the closed world of humanitarian aid workers; next, there’s Joseph, Simon’s cook, who uses the car as a clandestine taxi; finally, a bunch of car mechanics trying to bring the car back to life every time it breaks down. Until the very day the car, beyond repair, ends up as an abandoned carcass in the street . At that moment, Simonet, a blacksmith and sculptor, salvages some car parts to make the sculpture of Agbo, voodoo god of the “masters of the night,” commissioned by the wise men of the village of Ouassa. After a long trip by dugout canoe through the Benin lagoons, the sculpture will finally serve as the protecting fetish of the inhabitants of Ouassa. Divine Carcasse is an unusual hybrid, a half fictional, half ethnographic film. It is a study in cultural contrast, between a desacralized, materialistic European view of reality and an animist, pre-industrial African one. Belgian director Dominique Loreau has described her film as “an encounter with another culture, another way of relating to the world, objects and death - one that challenges our own relationships to the world.“ In a sense, Divine Carcasse could be seen as just an extended play on a double entendre - that “ancestor“ in French slang can mean an old car but to Africans refers to the omnipresent forces that shape their world. This film shows the literal metamorphosis of one of the most prosaic artifacts of Western culture, into a revered fetish of the coastal people of Benin. In so doing, it provides a concise lesson about the uneasy encounter between European technology and African tradition offering insight into some of our most deep-seated ideas about economics, art, anthropology and religion.
