by Hudson Moura
Before anything else, a clear warning: No Chains, No Masters contains repeated, graphic, and prolonged scenes of violence against Black bodies—whippings, branding, muzzling, animal-like treatment, executions—shown in close detail and with very little respite. For Afro-descendant viewers, especially those already carrying inherited or lived trauma around slavery and anti-Black violence, this is not a neutral “history lesson”: it can be overwhelming, triggering, and, at times, feels closer to an unbroken spectacle of suffering than to a space for mourning, resistance, or complex remembrance.
Simon Montaïrou’s No Chains, No Masters (Ni chaînes ni maîtres) is a film about enslavement that never lets you look away from the lash. Set in 1759 on Île de France (Mauritius), it follows Cicéron/Massamba (Ibrahima Mbaye), a Wolof man enslaved on a sugar plantation, and his teenage daughter Colette/Mati (Anna Thiandoum), who refuses to surrender her inner world. She dreams of Ngor, fi-boumi-diam-yi-dogue — an imagined refuge where Wolofs, Bambaras, Mandingues, Peuls, Malgaches, Dogons, Bantous, Yorubas and others live together in dignity under the protection of Mame Nguessou/Mami Wata, the goddess who dies and is reborn in the sea. It’s a powerful idea: against the plantation’s dehumanization, a Black mythical geography of return.
Cicéron is loyal, but lucid. He speaks the master’s language, understands the code, and knows loyalty is survival, not love. The film is sharp when it shows this tension: he is not “domesticated,” merely calculating. But the fragile balance shatters when he refuses to comply as expected, and Mati runs away in search of her utopian elsewhere. A manhunt begins. Her father follows. A white bounty hunter (Camille Cottin) with her two sons tracks them through the forest with a zeal that feels less like duty than ideology. The arc gestures toward reversal: the hunted may yet become the hunter, the spiritual pact with the ancestors may turn submission into insurgent force.
On paper, this is rich material: a slave narrative anchored in Wolof cosmology, an exploration of marronage, a reminder that enslaved people carried with them political imagination and complex spiritual systems. The film does attempt to stage that. Massamba’s bond with Mame Nguessou, the invocation of ancestral strength, the story of Ramatou the bird and the founding of villages — these are the most compelling moments, glimpses of a Black Atlantic mythology that resists being flattened into victimhood.
The problem is how Montaïrou chooses to film violence.
No Chains, No Masters is graphically, relentlessly brutal. Whippings shown in detail; flesh torn open; iron muzzles; hot brands searing Black skin; bodies humiliated, broken, displayed. Animals, too, are subjected to cruelty. There is almost no respite, no modulation, no breathing space in which to register interiority beyond pain. For a film that claims to reject chains and masters, it spends an extraordinary amount of time aestheticizing what chains and masters do to Black bodies.
Yes, the historical record is horrific. Yes, cinema has too often sanitized or minimized the atrocity of slavery. But there is a difference between refusing to look away and pinning the gaze to the wound. Here, repetition becomes its own logic. The violence is so frontally staged, so insistently underlined, that it risks sliding into a spectacle of Black suffering — a visual regime our screens are already saturated with. For viewers with African or Afro-diasporic roots, the experience can feel less like reckoning and more like retraumatization.
The film seems to believe that showing everything is, in itself, an act of justice. I’m not convinced. When we watch enslaved characters beaten, branded, muzzled, hunted again and again, without equivalent investment in their complexity, joy, erotic life, political strategy, or daily acts of refusal, we are not only “reminded” of the past; we are asked to consume yet another catalogue of atrocities that history has rarely punished. In a time when extremist and racist imaginaries still circulate freely, there is also a risk—unintended, but real—that such images are re-appropriated, not condemned.
To be fair, Montaïrou wants to do more. The spiritual thread — Massamba renewing a pact with his ancestors, calling Mame Nguessou, reclaiming power — aims to turn the narrative from pure victimization toward resistance. The idea that “the hunter becomes the hunted” hovers over the final movement. But thematically and visually, the balance never quite holds. The symbolic counterweight (myth, revolt, Black cosmology) is underdeveloped compared to the meticulous catalog of tortures. The result is morally lopsided: the oppression is hyper-visible, the liberation largely hypothetical.
Structurally, the film is also grinding. Because it offers almost no tonal variation, no textured social world beyond the binary of sadistic masters and suffering captives, its outrage flattens into monotony. The bounty hunter is sketched as a near-caricature of white ferocity; the plantation owner (Benoît Magimel) is archetypal rather than interrogated; the enslaved community’s relationships, conflicts, and strategies remain mostly off-screen. We are left with an atmosphere of unbroken anguish that neither deepens our understanding of the system nor opens new pathways for Black historical imagination.
That, for me, is the core issue. No Chains, No Masters clearly intends to honor the memory of those who suffered and resisted, and to confront European audiences with a violence too often minimized in national narratives. But the film’s aesthetic choices make it hard to recommend. Its most resonant element — Mati’s faith in another geography, another order, the story of Ramatou’s flight and future villages — is drowned out by images that echo, too closely and too constantly, the dehumanization they seek to condemn.
This is not to argue for comfort cinema about slavery. It is to insist that how we represent Black pain matters. Here, the emphasis on suffering over subjectivity, on punishment over politics, leaves me uneasy. As someone of African diasporic descent, and attentive to how my students encounter these histories, I struggle to see how this particular accumulation of horrors nourishes resistance or imagination. It remembers, yes — but remembrance without care for the viewer’s psychic ground, and without equal commitment to Black life beyond the lash, can end up feeling like another form of captivity.
1.5/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 