Poetics of Relation: The Open Boat is loosely based on the book Poetics of Relation by the French Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. The film takes poetic liberty at expanding on Glissant’s elusive prose as a metaphor and framework to contest and reflect on current-day migrant experiences; the violence of displacement through the eyes of multiple characters and scenarios. Capturing Glissant’s life (Paris in the 1960s), exiled from his natal country Martinique because of political reasons, he experiences his home through dreams; the prism of long-buried fragments of childhood memories. Souleymane, a newly arrived Ivorian migrant in Paris, navigates his budding queer discoveries in the city with Lucien, an MFA film student making a documentary about Glissant’s life. Souleymane grows torn between his Muslim background and his sexuality. Mame-Fatou Niang, a single woman in her late 30s, and Lucien’s professor of African studies at Sorbonne Université, is in a contentious relationship with her younger sister, Aya, a Hip-Hop singer grappling with issues of identity and belonging who is estranged from her traditional Muslim parents. These are just a few of the interconnected narratives the film weaves, documenting errantry tales illuminating the plights of disparate lives from different races and classes at a trajectory, caught in the maelstrom of survival, resistance, love, and global political consternation.