In a 1989 interview with Judy Stone, Claire Denis explained that the title, comes from the 1950s slang meaning "to be had, to be cheated", and thus refers to the status in French Cameroon of being black and being cheated; it is also an allusion to Protée's dark-brown skin and the racial fetishism of Africans by Europeans.
The film is semi-autobiographical -Claire Denis was raised in a French colonial family in West Africa [from 1948 - 1963]. She was two months old when she moved from her native France to Africa. Denis's family stayed in Cameroon for three years after its 1960 independence. Her father set up a radio station for the new government.
Cameroon was a German protectorate from 1884 until Germany lost World War I (1914-1918). France and Britain divided Cameroon into two colonies in 1922; at the end of World War II, in 1946, France and Britain promised to grant Cameroon self-government - eventually. French (East) Cameroon became the Independent Republic of Cameroon on Jan. 1, 1960. The two Cameroons - East and West - were confederated from 1961 to 1972, when a new constitution joined the two states. English and French are Cameroon's official languages, although most Cameroonese speak African languages.
William J. "Mungo" Park (Emmet Judson Williamson), who meets with the adult France at the beginning of the film, is bearing the name of famous 19th century European "explorer" of Africa: Mungo Park. He as a Scottish explorer of West Africa. After an exploration of the upper Niger River around 1796, he wrote a popular and influential travel book titled "Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa" in which he theorized the Niger and Congo merged to become the same river. Park was the first Westerner to have recorded travels in the central portion of the Niger, and through his popular book introduced the public to a vast unexplored continent which influenced future European explorers and colonial ambitions in Africa.
Underwent a 4K digital restoration in 2022 by the Éclair labs from the original feature negative, supervised by director Claire Denis and original cinematographer Robert Alazraki.