The Empire

In a small village on the Côte d'Opale in northern France, the arrival of a newborn causes unrest in the galaxy. The imperial forces of the sinister Beelzebub land on Earth to seize the child, who is predicted to have an extraordinary destiny. But the queen's emissaries want to prevent this. Under the apathetic gaze of two dim-witted policemen, northern France becomes the epicenter of a war of enormous proportions—a European version of Star Wars, or sometimes simply “at the Sch'tis.” Bruno Dumont (“Jeanne D'Arc,” “France”) strikes up an apocalyptic swan song between social realism and burlesque space opera. In the vastness of space and the French Opal Coast, nothing is sacred to him. “This absurd comedy brings together the provinces and the cosmos, stars and amateurs, the sacred and the profane, and a bunch of sophisticated and half-baked ideas to create a provincial space opera in which only humanity is taken seriously. - Worth seeing” (Lexikon des Internationalen Films) Dumont caricatures religious, secular, and film-historical notions of the radical opposition between good and evil by using the space saga as an exaggerated visual and motivic metaphor. He consistently rejects moral or even didactic messages: at the center is “moralism” as an empty, comical shell—a principle without substance. The opposing forces merely serve as representatives of abstract ideas of “good” and “evil.” It is a sophisticated narrative approach that ventures into silly shallows only to rise again in sublime space panoramas. Once again, Dumont's unmistakable signature style is evident: a mixture of seriousness and humor, simplicity and complexity, accessibility and sublimity, the profane and the spiritual. At the same time, “The Empire” is also an impressive cinematic experience thanks to its exquisite special effects. In the 2024 Berlinale competition, Dumont's sci-fi comedy, which cleverly subverts all genre expectations, won the Silver Bear - Jury Prize, somewhere between art cinema and provincial farce.