The Other Profile
Armel Hostiou / / 2023
An elementally suspenseful and completely unpredictable detective story from Kinshasa, where a French film director has to find his own double. A film about virtual identities in a post-colonial century.
French filmmaker Armel Hostiou discovers he has a double in Kinshasa. Someone has created a fake Facebook profile in his name to hustle aspiring actors. So Armel heads to Congo’s vast capital to track him down, and there begins one of the wildest and most unpredictable films of the year. An elementally suspenseful and wildly entertaining detective story about a white filmmaker on foreign ground. But also a story which with hilarious self-irony and in one twist after another turns into a darker story about the internet, identities and post-colonial struggles in the 21st century. Armel is helped by a group of young local artists who approach the doppelganger mystery with a casual coolness far from that of their European guest. But every time you think the mystery is solved, ‘The Other Profile’ takes a new turn. For as an elderly fisherman says to Armel around a campfire in the middle of the night, in a chilling scene that makes the little hairs stand up, ‘If you’re looking for the fake, search inside yourself.’