Claire Denis is a filmmaker for whom returning to a geography has never meant simply returning to a place; it means confronting a wound that has never fully healed. Africa in her cinema is neither an exotic backdrop nor merely the setting in which a story unfolds, but a historical memory that carries within it colonialism, violence, and unequal relations of power. Having spent her childhood in various African countries, Denis has always depicted the continent through the lens of lived experience—an experience that became one of the defining features of her cinematic world in films such as Chocolat and White Material. Now, after many years, she returns to Africa once again with The Fence. But this return is less a revisiting of the past than a renewed confrontation with the present: a present that reveals that the mechanisms of colonialism have never disappeared, but have merely changed their form.
The Fence is an adaptation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, a playwright whose works cannot be regarded simply as dramatic texts. Koltès’s writing is less concerned with telling stories than with issuing manifestos against colonialism, racism, and the hidden structures of domination—works that reveal how power exists before it is ever exercised on the battlefield: in language, in economics, in human relationships, and even in the silences between people. His characters often inhabit borders: the border between colonizer and colonized, center and periphery, those who have the right to speak and those whose voices go unheard. Denis, faithful to this spirit, transforms the play not into a historical film but into a film about the present—a film that shows that colonialism has not ended, but continues to exist in the form of infrastructure projects, foreign investment, and global economic structures.
The film’s title offers the key to its interpretation from the very beginning. “The Fence” is not merely a physical barrier; it is a metaphor for all the boundaries the modern world has constructed to preserve relations of power. The fence between white and Black, between landowner and outsider, between security and threat, between those who are seen and those who must remain behind walls. The film’s central setting is a construction site protected by security forces: a small island of the Western world built in the middle of an African landscape and separated from its surroundings by walls and barbed wire. This fence does less to protect those inside than to reveal their fear. They are afraid of the world in which they live, and in order to preserve their position, they must constantly create distance between themselves and the Other.
Gradually, Denis reveals that the fence does not merely separate the outside from the inside; it also traps the characters within a psychological prison. The project manager, his colleagues, and the guards are all prisoners of a structure whose survival depends upon maintaining precisely this separation. In contrast, the African man who arrives to claim his brother’s body is a force that disrupts this closed order. He is neither an attacker nor a rebel; he simply wants to reclaim a body that has been denied to him even after death. This simple demand throws the entire apparatus of power into a state of anxiety, because the fence has meaning only as long as what lies outside remains silent and obedient.
Yet Denis does not reduce this confrontation to a simple struggle between good and evil. Horn, the project manager, is not merely a representative of some sinister face of colonialism; he embodies a logic that places the survival of the project above every ethical consideration and attempts to contain every crisis through administrative and security mechanisms. Cal, meanwhile, although he is also part of this structure, feels its moral erosion more acutely than the others. His cynical attitude toward the project and his sarcastic question about what it actually means reveal that what is called development has ceased, in his eyes, to be a promise of construction and has instead become a process that turns human beings into instruments of its own advancement. Yet the filmmaker does not turn Cal into a dissident or liberator either. Like Horn, he is trapped within the very mechanism whose survival he helps sustain. The difference between the two lies not in their positions but in the way they confront a crisis in whose creation both have played a part.
At the center of the film is a body that is rarely seen. The African worker’s corpse becomes the work’s most important narrative element without directly appearing for much of the film. This absence is not accidental. By delaying a direct confrontation with the body, Denis depicts the politics of erasing human beings. Throughout the history of colonialism, the colonized body has repeatedly been treated as an object of possession: its labor can be exploited, violence can be inflicted upon it, and even after death, decisions can still be made about its fate. In The Fence, too, the corpse becomes an administrative commodity—a subject for negotiation, bargaining, and control. But for Alboury, this body is not merely the remains of a human being; it is the last sign of the dignity of a brother whose right even to mourn has been taken from him by the colonial system. Here the film reaches one of its most important themes: the politics of invisibility. Colonialism does not operate only through the occupation of land; it also proceeds through the erasure of faces. People who are not seen are easier to forget, and forgetting is one of the most effective instruments of domination. Until the final moments, Denis makes the corpse less an objective image than an absent presence—an absence that haunts the entire space of the film. The significance of this choice lies in the fact that, ultimately, the body does not disappear; it becomes a demand for the restoration of human dignity, and through that demand, all the contradictions of the project are exposed.
If Horn is the managerial face of power, Cal is by no means free of a clear conscience. He is educated and more aware than the others of the contradictions within the project, but this awareness does not lead to liberation. He himself has played a role in the crisis around which the narrative revolves and now attempts to present it as an unintended accident. For this reason, his relationship with Horn is not merely a personal disagreement; it is a confrontation between two ways of dealing with power. Cal expects Horn’s complicity because they share a past and he believes loyalty should take precedence over truth. Horn, however, despite all his own considerations, returns responsibility to Cal and attempts to resolve the crisis within the rules of the very structure that both men serve. Here Denis avoids simple moral judgment. Neither Cal is an absolute victim nor Horn the sole agent of violence; both are products of a logic in which preserving the project has become more important than human life.
From this perspective, Cal’s sarcastic remark about the project takes on a meaning that goes beyond a single line of dialogue. When he asks, “What are we? Development projects?” he is in fact questioning the ideological foundations of development itself—a form of development that is supposed to build a bridge but first and foremost turns human beings into instruments for its own realization. In the world of the film, the bridge is not a symbol of connection; it is the symbol of a promise built upon erasure and inequality. Without rejecting the idea of development itself, Denis asks a more fundamental question: development for whom, and who pays the price for bringing it about?
The film’s atmosphere owes more than anything to Claire Denis’s camera. Unlike many political films that represent violence through overt scenes, she embeds threat within the texture of the image. Constricted frames, muted light, silence, and the oppressive weight of night transform the project site into a space that seems perpetually on the verge of exploding. Violence is felt before it occurs. The camera never rushes to display the crisis because the place itself carries the crisis within it. The guards watching the grounds from their watchtowers are less protectors than signs of a world whose survival is built upon suspicion. This visual strategy also reinforces the meaning of the fence. No one is free—not those standing behind the fence, nor those living within it. In fact, the fence imprisons its owners just as much as it confines the Other. This is one of Denis’s most subtle observations, expressed without slogans: colonialism deprives not only the colonized but also the colonizer of the possibility of living as fully human beings.
The arrival of Léonie, Horn’s young wife, adds another layer to the film. She enters a world whose rules are entirely masculine—a world of power, weapons, hierarchy, and fear. At first, her presence seems insignificant, but gradually it becomes clear that her gaze differs from that of the other men. Her relationship with Horn has itself emerged from the same history of violence that the film addresses, as though even the characters’ most intimate relationships cannot be separated from relations of power. Cal’s gaze upon this relationship, meanwhile, reveals less about Léonie than it does about a masculine and possessive mentality that defines women, much like land and labor, in terms of interest and ownership. Léonie is neither the film’s hero nor its savior; she is a witness who has not yet been completely absorbed into the logic of this world. This distance gives her the possibility of seeing and questioning. She creates a crack in the closed world of the men, and through her gaze, the viewer realizes that what appears to be a mere infrastructure project is, in reality, a continuation of the same relations that colonialism established long ago.
Perhaps the most important achievement of The Fence is that it represents colonialism not as an event belonging to the past but as a recurring structure. There are no longer classical colonial armies; they have been replaced by multinational corporations, infrastructure projects, and global economic relations. The power dynamic, however, has not changed. People still arrive from elsewhere, make decisions about other people’s lands, and pursue development without acknowledging its human cost. From this perspective, The Fence is about more than Africa; it is about the contemporary world—a world that conceals domination behind words such as development, investment, and security. The fence is no longer made merely of metal wires; it is also constructed from economic mechanisms, official narratives, and the politics of invisibility. In such a world, the human body can easily become an object of management, negotiation, and erasure.
Even so, The Fence is not a flawless film. Claire Denis’s fidelity to Koltès’s dramatic world sometimes keeps the film too close to its theatrical origins. Some of the dialogue takes on a distinctly literary quality, and the film’s slow pace may create a certain distance for some viewers. Yet this stillness is also consistent with the world of the film—a world in which violence operates not through sudden explosions but through the gradual erosion of human beings.
Claire Denis’s latest work can be regarded as one of her most explicitly political films: a film that, rather than reconstructing the past, interrogates the present and reminds us that the most dangerous fences are not those made of wire and concrete, but those erected between human beings in the name of development.
© 2026. Phoenix Review