Dharma Guns

Dharma Guns
Original French Theatrical Poster
Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov)
Directed byF. J. Ossang
Written byF. J. Ossang
Produced byBernard Plougeaut
Starring
  • Guy McKnight
  • Elvire
  • Lionel Tua
  • Diogo Dória
CinematographyGleb Teleshov
Edited byF. J. Ossang
Jean-Christophe Sanchez
Music byJack Belsen-Hautmont
Little Drake
MKB Fraction Provisoire
Production
companies
  • OSS/100 Films & Documents
  • Cinemate
  • Love Streams agnès b. Productions
Distributed bySolaris Distribution (France)
Release date
  • March 9, 2011 (2011-03-09) (France)
Running time
93 minutes
Countries
  • France
  • Portugal
LanguageFrench
Budget€1.83 million

Dharma Guns (French: Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov)) is a 2010 French–Portuguese film written and directed by F. J. Ossang. Starring Guy McKnight, Elvire, Lionel Tua and Diogo Dória, it follows a man whose water-skiing accident leads to a mysterious journey involving an inheritance, a missing fiancée and a secret society. Its story draws on science fiction and film noir and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Ossang's fourth feature film, Dharma Guns was made largely in the Azores as a French–Portuguese coproduction. Photographed by Gleb Teleshov in black-and-white and color, it was selected for the Orizzonti section of the 67th Venice International Film Festival in 2010. Solaris Distribution released it in France on March 9, 2011. Reviews were divided, with critics praising its images while disagreeing over its fragmented narrative.

Plot

Délie drives a speedboat while towing her fiancé, Stan van der Decken, on water skis. Their attempt to push their limits ends in a serious accident. Stan is taken away in an ambulance, where medical personnel struggle to keep him conscious.

Stan appears to awaken from a coma in Saint-Elme Hospital, but Délie is missing. After his discharge, he learns that genealogists have been searching for someone with his identity in connection with the estate of the deceased Professor Starkov. He accepts the inheritance and sets out for Las Estrellas, where he hopes to discover what has happened to Délie.

In Las Estrellas, Stan meets Jon, Dr. Ewers and Arthur Strike and becomes involved with a secret society called the Dharma Guns. As he searches for Délie and investigates Starkov's legacy, familiar faces reappear in unfamiliar circumstances, and the boundaries between his past and present become increasingly uncertain.

Stan eventually reunites with Délie, and they drive away together. He speaks of leaving death behind and continuing on without knowing where the road will lead. But Stan's journey ends where it began: in the ambulance following the accident, as the medical attendants realize that he is dying.

Cast

Production

Development and financing

Dharma Guns was Ossang's first feature since Doctor Chance (1997), ending a thirteen-year interval during which he continued working in short films. His projects included Silencio, Ciel éteint ! and Vladivostok !, and the new feature reunited him with cinematographer Gleb Teleshov and actor Guy McKnight, both associated with his preceding short-film work.

The film was developed as a French–Portuguese coproduction between OSS/100 Films & Documents and Cinemate, with Love Streams agnès b. Productions as a coproducer and Chaya Films, Bando à Parte and the Azores Film Commission as associated partners. Its €1.83 million budget included an advance on receipts from France's Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC). The Portuguese production arrangements evolved during development, with Cinemate assuming the principal Portuguese producing role initially associated with Rodrigo Areias's company Bando à Parte.

Additional financing was sought through an internet subscription campaign organized by Ossang. Known as the Souscription Starkov, the initiative acknowledged its first 33 contributors in the film's closing credits, with Cédric Sineux responsible for the campaign's website.

Filming

Principal photography took place in May and June 2009, largely on São Miguel Island in the Azores. Although the original production plan called for approximately half the filming to take place in the archipelago, the proportion eventually reached about 95 percent. The production received more than €400,000 in support from the Azorean regional government.

The film was photographed by Gleb Teleshov on 35 mm film, combining black-and-white and color photography. Production used Kodak Plus-X, Double-X and 5205 film stocks, with laboratory processing in Paris and Lisbon and digital postproduction at Mikros Image. Ossang edited the film with Jean-Christophe Sanchez, while Julien Cloquet worked on its sound recording and mixing.

Style and music

Ossang described the film as an Orphic journey structured in three movements and three distinct space-times. In a 2011 interview at the Fantasia festival, he described it as a journey into the land of the dead, reversing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice against a background of genetic trafficking and a conspiracy involving the Dharma Guns secret society. He characterized the events as an interval between Stan entering a coma and his disappearance. He also connected its imagery of water, air and fire to his preceding short films. The film alternates black-and-white, color and tinted passages. Ossang explained that the changes in photographic register unsettle the usual distinction between remembered events and present experience, rather than assigning black-and-white to the past.

The predominantly black-and-white photography draws on Ossang's interest in the expressive qualities of faces and landscapes in silent cinema. Brief passages of color interrupt the monochrome imagery, evoking moments of reality within Stan's uncertain experience. José Sarmiento Hinojosa connected these shifts to the film's exploration of memory and the afterlife, comparing Stan's journey to a descent into the underworld of Dante Alighieri.

The film's music combines original compositions by Jack Belsen-Hautmont, Little Drake and Ossang's group MKB Fraction Provisoire with recordings by Lard, the Cramps, Earle Hagen and the New Interns, and the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. Guy McKnight, who plays Stan, was the singer of the latter group. The opening water-skiing sequence makes particularly striking use of music, reinforcing the speed and danger of the scene.

The original soundtrack was produced by Jack Belsen and Bruce Satarenko, recorded and mixed by Julien Cloquet, and credited as available through CÉditions Tracks.

Release

Dharma Guns was selected for the Orizzonti section of the 67th Venice International Film Festival in September 2010. UMedia handled international sales at the time of the festival, and also acquired sales rights to Ossang's three preceding features and three recent short films. The film subsequently screened at the Helsinki International Film Festival and the French Film Festival in the Czech Republic in 2010, and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2011 as part of a programme devoted to Ossang.

Solaris Distribution released the film theatrically in France on March 9, 2011. It later appeared at CPH PIX and the New Horizons International Film Festival in 2011. A two-disc DVD edition pairing Dharma Guns with Ossang's Triptyque du paysage—comprising the short films Silencio, Ciel éteint ! and Vladivostok !—was issued by Potemkine Films on September 4, 2012, with distribution by Arcadès. The Cinémathèque française screened a 35 mm print in March 2018. The film also appeared in a filmmaker-focused programme at the Taipei Film Festival that year.

Critical response

Contemporary French reviews were divided over the relationship between the film's visual invention and its fragmented story. Isabelle Regnier of Le Monde praised the force of Ossang's compositions and his interplay of images, sound and text, arguing that the film invited viewers to find their own way through its enigmatic material. Serge Kaganski of Les Inrockuptibles likewise valued the experience of watching a film resistant to straightforward explanation. By contrast, Vincent Thabourey of Positif criticized the opaque screenplay and excessive dialogue, while Thierry Chèze of StudioCiné Live considered the film increasingly mannered.

Frédéric Caillard, writing for Critikat, admired the film's carefully composed images and its world assembled from different periods and cinematic traditions. He nevertheless found that the relationship between Stan's experience and the unfolding mystery was insufficiently clear, leaving the film visually compelling but narratively frustrating. In a 2013 essay for Desistfilm, Sarmiento Hinojosa interpreted the changes in color, time and identity as integral to the film's treatment of death and consciousness.

Film scholar Nicole Brenez interpreted Dharma Guns as an attempt to depict the formation of images in the mind of a dying man. She praised its treatment of light and mental imagery, and compared its journey toward death with Nosferatu (1922) and Vampyr (1932). The Dutch critic Jelle Schot praised the opening water-skiing sequence but was less convinced by the increasingly elusive narrative that followed.

References

  1. ↑ "Dharma Guns". Cineuropa. Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov): Pressbook" (PDF). Storyfinders. Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 Lemercier, Fabien (August 23, 2010). "Ossang's Dharma Guns in UMedia line-up". Cineuropa.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Dharma Guns". Unifrance. Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  5. 1 2 Caillard, Frédéric (March 15, 2011). "Dharma Guns (la succession Starkov)". Critikat (in French).
  6. 1 2 Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov) (Motion picture) (in French). OSS/100 Films & Documents; Cinemate; Love Streams agnès b. Productions. 2010. {{cite AV media}}: Unknown parameter |at= ignored (help)
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov): Dossier de presse" (PDF) (in French). Solaris Distribution. 2011.
  8. 1 2 "Dharma Guns (F. J. Ossang, 2010)". La Cinémathèque française (in French). Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  9. 1 2 3 Ossang, F. J. (July 19, 2013). "Punk Intervention: A Conversation with F. J. Ossang". Desistfilm (Interview). Interviewed by Mónica Delgado, Michèle Collery and Mina Blumenfield.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov) (Motion picture) (in French). OSS/100 Films & Documents; Cinemate; Love Streams agnès b. Productions. 2010. {{cite AV media}}: Unknown parameter |at= ignored (help)
  11. ↑ Areias, Rodrigo (January 8, 2010). "Rodrigo & André". Rua de Baixo (Interview) (in Portuguese). Interviewed by Bruno Gaspar.
  12. 1 2 "Filme rodado nos Açores apresentado no Festival de Veneza". Açoriano Oriental (in Portuguese). Lusa. September 8, 2010.
  13. ↑ Cabral, Rui Jorge (September 20, 2009). "Há todas as condições para se fazer cinema nos Açores". Açoriano Oriental (in Portuguese).
  14. 1 2 F. J. Ossang (2011). Fantasia 2011 – Dharma Guns (Interview) (in French). Fantasia International Film Festival. {{cite AV media}}: Unknown parameter |at= ignored (help)
  15. 1 2 Sarmiento Hinojosa, José (July 25, 2013). "F. J. Ossang: Punk Cinema and the Subversion of Film Noir". Desistfilm.
  16. 1 2 Schot, Jelle (January 19, 2011). "Filmmaker in Focus: F. J. Ossang". VPRO Cinema (in Dutch).
  17. ↑ "Dharma Guns". International Film Festival Rotterdam. Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  18. ↑ "Dharma Guns + Triptyque du paysage – F. J. Ossang". Potemkine Films (in French). DVD catalogue listing; EAN 3545020025000.
  19. ↑ Regnier, Isabelle (March 8, 2011). "« Dharma guns » : voyage dans une « interzone »". Le Monde (in French).
  20. 1 2 "Dharma Guns (La Succession Starkov): Critiques". Première (in French). Retrieved November 5, 2026.
  21. ↑ Brenez, Nicole (February 2011). "F.J. Ossang: The Grand Insurrectionary Style". LOLA (1).