The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Elegant, spare, poetic, uncomfortably quiet, and, at times, inscrutable, No Fear, No Die is a little-known masterwork in the oeuvre of Denis.”

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Senses of Cinema

Claire Denis’s underseen follow-up to her exceptional debut Chocolat was among the few absentees in our major 2019 Denis retrospective. Let this dazzling new 2022 restoration serve as our belated corrective! Set on the nocturnal fringes of Paris, the film concerns two African immigrants (Isaach De Bankolé and Alex Descas) who eke a living out of staging illegal cockfights in a restaurant basement. Living in windowless squalor with the fowls they train, the pair start to snap when the restaurant’s seedy owner (Jean-Claude Brialy), who has history with one of their mothers, demands more bloodshed in the ring. Inspired by the anticolonial theories of philosopher Frantz Fanon, Denis’s sophomore feature is a potent allegory of colonial violence, rendered in her woozy, intimate, visceral style. It marked Denis’s first collaboration with Descas, from here on a mainstay of her cinema, and features a jazz score by Abdullah Ibrahim.

“One of the most heart-wrenching films ever made.”

Amy Taubin, Artforum

“Indelible … [The start of] one of the most startling runs of inspiration in contemporary cinema.”

Max Nelson, New York Review of Books