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.
In October 2016, Senegalese economist, musician and poet Felwine Sarr founded the "Ateliers de la Pensée", the so-called workshops for thought, together his friend political scientist Achille Mbembe. Over four days in Dakar, they gathered together leading Senegalese intellectuals including Lydie Moudileno, Romuald Fonkoua and Nadia Yala Kisukidi for a long overdue theoretical e...
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...
Tells the story of an idealistic young politician's rise and fall. Daam, a well-intentioned but vacillating European-trained politician must choose between two social paradigms exemplified by his two wives. The first, Gagnesiri, is the village beauty, who waits patiently for Daam. Unfortunately, they are unable to conceive a child, so Daam takes European-educated Kiné, who is e...
Joris Lachaise takes us to Thiaroye, in a suburb near Dakar, to enter the psychiatric hospital accompanied by writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla who has been admitted there several times. She meets up with her doctor, familiar patients and others with whom she discusses the delicate issue of therapeutic methods and their link with colonialism. The project is clearly ambitious, it...
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...
A Letter from Yene emerges from conversations with the community in the seaside town of Yene, Senegal, where Diawara lives for part of the year. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urbanisation. Fish have become scarce and the pirogues, traditional fishing boats, c...
In 1989, after a clash near the border between Mauritanian shepherds and Senegalese peasants, there was an escalation of racist violence in both countries. These events caused thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. Today, despite appearances, the wounds have not healed.
