In a time of physical distancing, artistic expression becomes an ever so important manifestation of our shared humanity. Mbas Mi (‘the pandemic’, in Wolof) takes the viewer on a walk through the narrow streets of Gorée Island, guided by the voice of Senegalese artist Goo Mamadou Ba, narrating an extract from The Plague by Albert Camus.
Mossane is a beautiful 14-year-old girl who has just reached marriageable age in a village in Senegal. She has many suitors, including a simple-minded farmer's son who plans to drag her away. Even her own brother Ngor is in love with her. However she is in love with Fara, a poor student who has returned to the village, while the university is on strike. At birth, she had been p...
Manthia Diawara’s latest essay film, AI: African Intelligence, explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from dise...
Juste un Mouvement (‘Just a Movement’) is Vincent Meessen’s free take on La Chinoise, the 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard, and a “film in progress of making itself” in Dakar. It is conceived as a re-editing operation of Godard’s film, reallocating its roles and characters, and updating its plot. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the o...
Dafa Metti casts a spotlight on undocumented Senegalese migrants who make a living by selling souvenirs under the famed Eiffel Tower. Life is difficult (dafa metti) as they not only support their loved ones with their meagre earnings but their livelihoods and safety are constantly threatened by Parisien police. Deportation is also a constant fear. But they are relentless. Dafa ...
The film accompanies Magaye Niyang, a star of Touki-Bouki, a 1972 classic directed by her own uncle Djibril Diop. Following this path, we are witness of Niyang travel to a special screening of the film, which has a public release in his old town. Niyang seems detached and with a heavy longing from the past, and therefore, the film debris permeates everything with unescapable so...