An Athenian filmmaker is struggling with insomnia and seeks help from a tarot reader. She says that when she does manage to sleep, her dreams are strange, she dreams of her childhood apartment, where everyone has turned to stone. Yet such surreal thoughts hardly sound outlandish given the current state of Greece: petrified monuments to past glories as far as the eye can see, even as any sort of movement in the present has slowed to a standstill. She sets out to understand this curious paradox, dipping into literature, fiction and documentary to do so, disparate elements given unity by playfulness, political sensibility and shimmering celluloid.
Conversations with locals on the streets of the Greek capital about the nature of statues; the 1944 manifesto by poet Yorgos Makris that proposed blowing up the Parthenon and the groupuscule that now seeks to complete his work; the story of the political prisoners forced to rebuild the same monument in miniature; a rogue Caryatid now discovering love. Such times are hard to make sense of, whether in Greece or beyond, and perhaps there is only one way to proceed, to move forward, to live: everything bit by bit. “When will we gather the world together piece by piece?”

Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.

Focussing on Sitabaomba, Lova shows over several years how the village population attempt to defend their farmland. Their fight is reminiscent of David against Goliath but doesn’t lead to despondence. Because in Madagascar, a very unique form of artistic, especially linguistic expression has always been cultivated which, at its best, allows people to maintain an inner independence. The commentary is therefore spoken in the style of “Kabary.” This polite, rhetorically sophisticated and sometimes mocking form of speech elegantly circumvents criticism, thus stating it all the more clearly. An artist also visits the village repeatedly and makes stones speak with the children, confirming an attitude Nantenaina Lova describes as follows: “Laughing at injustice rather than crying, resisting rather than pitying.”