Beyond the Ocean/Après l’océan, which slow-working Eliane de Latour directed and also wrote, gets its American première when in person she presents this year’s Centerpiece of the Lincoln Center 17th Annual New York African Film Festival. The group of thirteen features and twenty-five shorts representing eighteen nations is subtitled “Independent Africa” to honor a half-century of independence for seventeen countries on that continent, Côte d’Ivoire among them.

Nevertheless, a-hundred-six-minute BO depicts that former French protectorate’s continuing emotional and economic umbilical dependence on the mother country and its Western neighbors. Subtitled from official French, indigenous Dioula, Spanish and English, it is the pilgrimage to dreams of escaping poverty, making it big abroad, and returning home in triumph to distribute largesse.

An unseen Seraphin at least claims success in New York and sends a photo, but the focus and contrast lie entirely on two buddies whose journeys take different directions to converge again at a cattle car at the end. There is no preparation for unwilling returnee Otho’s (Djédjé Apali) outburst of envy and assertion that others are “blinded by Europe, ashamed of Africa,” even if compatriots reference American movies. Things uneasily smoothed over, however, he sets off to try his luck once more.

Cutting back-and-forth among three major locations each introducing its own additional characters, the storyline is rough to grasp before zeroing in on the twinned friends and those closest to them. Otho and Shad (Fraser James) are working and dealing with falsified papers in an unnamed Spanish Mediterranean port, until customs police detain and deport the former while the other slips away.

Heading north by train, Shad mails home his cassette-taped voice but is ashamed to phone without money to help out his fiancée, Otho’s sister Pelagie, who works for Billy Bosch making knockoff clothing with Dubai labels, much less to help upgrade the mosque of which his father is Elder. In London’s netherworld of illegal immigrants, the young man is exploited at one job after another, including ones for big-talking compatriot Tetanus.

SPOILER ALERT

Free spirit Tango (Marie-Josée Croze) picks him up, or rather adopts him, leaves her lesbian lover, and proposes they marry to get him a residence and work permit. This will be easier in the Paris she left eight years earlier to escape from family and the would-be lover’s attentions of relative Bruno. That unwanted suitor’s father likes and employs the African, but the rejected son pesters Tango as a “dyke” and has his boys beat up her immigrant companion. Tango, meanwhile, also hooks up with African-French Olga (Sara Martins) at a club, and with tragic results Bruno’s jealousy and latent racism are vented.

While this in London and Paris, there are intercuts back to Ivory Coast, where Otho goes nowhere in nothing jobs. Platonic Shad and Olga make a poorly defined score, which enables him to head home flush with Euros for wedding and mosque.

A bit of the exposition is inadequate or lacking, as for example Otho’s squandering what cash his friend does manage to remit home, while in other instances it is clumsy, as when mother Angeline and father argue behind a curtained door. Thus, the intrusion at a celebration party and the ensuing argument take viewers off guard, as does an unconvincing settling of differences early next morning.

Once subsidiary characters are sorted out and central Shad and Otho defined, the film’s achievement is in its picture of apathy, stagnation and well-nigh impossibility in Abidjan and, clearer with greater screen time, of the insecure, sometimes violent lives of undocumented Third World refugees competing among themselves in First World capitals that do not much want them. Though many come up short, with opening animated Kanta they are nonetheless “warriors.”

(Released by Shellac Distribution; not rated by MPAA.)