Director Joseph Gaï Ramaka writes: "Carmen is a myth but what does Carmen represent today? Where do Carmen's love and freedom stand at the onset of the 21st Century? Therein lies my film's intent, a black Carmen, plunged in the magical and chaotic urbanity of an African city." Prosper Merimée's novella, adapted in Bizet's celebrated opera, has already received 52 film interpretations, most notably the all black Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge, and, more recently, Carlos Saura's flamenco Carmen and Jean-Luc Godard's B-movie version Pré Nom Carmen. Yet Karmen Geï is the first African Carmen and, arguably, the first African filmed "musical." Accordingly, Gaï Ramaka has completely replaced Bizet's score and the usual staging with indigenous Senegalese music and choreography: Doudou N'Diaye Rose's sabar drummers, Julien Jouga's choir, El Hadj Ndiaye's songs and Yandé Coudou Sène's prophetic voice. Saxophonist David Murray's contemporary jazz score runs like a thread of unfulfilled desire through the film. Karmen Geï may convince viewers that this African ambiance is what the Carmen legend, perhaps leading back through Andalusia to its African roots, has been waiting for all these years. Like every Carmen, Karmen Geï is about the conflict between infinite desire for freedom and the laws, conventions, languages, the human limitations which constrain that desire. Since this is an African Carmen, freedom necessarily has a political dimension. The opening scene is set in a women's prison on Goree Island, site of the notorious slave castle. Karmen and the women in the prison use dance and music as a weapon of resistance against dehumanizing regimentation as has so often been the case throughout the African Diaspora. Karmen's outrageously provocative performance seduces Angelique, the warden, the symbol of authority, inverting the power relationships within the prison. Karmen literally transforms prison life into a musical production number celebrating the triumph of her sexuality and that of the other women. Karmen is called, "She who wreaks havoc," signifying that she is both a liberator and a destroyer of every order.