French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, niece of legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty (Touki Bouki), has emerged in recent years as cinematic force to be reckoned with. With only two feature length films to her name, including this year’s critically acclaimed documentary Dahomey, Diop has already racked up an impressive slate of accolades. The first black woman to compete for the Palme D’Or (with the premiere of her debut feature Atlantics), and winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, Mati Diop is certainly one to watch. A prolific experimental filmmaker, she has amassed an impressive filmography that includes a diverse array of narrative and documentary short films spanning a vast number of subjects. As Dahomey is poised to make its streaming debut, we take a look back at her earlier work.
SNOW CANON (2011)
Something of an outlier in Diop’s filmography, this short film charts a teenaged girl’s sapphic sexual awakening over the course of a few days at her parent’s chalet in the French Alps. Apparently quite autobiographical, the film plays with the concepts of fantasy and inner adolescent landscapes of imagination, leaving the viewer to question what is real and what is imagined while giving Diop the opportunity for increasingly sophisticated visual experimentation. At times as messy at its protagonists, Snow Canon is absorbing nonetheless,
foreshadowing the complexity of Mati Diop’s later work and lingering in the mind of the viewer long after the credits roll.
BIG IN VIETNAM (2012)
Loosely framed around the conceit of an ill-fated film production in Marseille, Big in Vietnam is an enigmatic exploration of the metaphysical reality of living in the diaspora. In just 34 minutes, Diop draws on her own diasporic roots to plumb the existential depths of the immigrant experience, deftly projecting the persisting melancholy of longing for a place that you no longer belong to. Chock full of insightful commentary, the film’s most powerful metaphor is a visual one. As the film’s central pair wanders aimlessly down the beach, Diop frames them against an empty, pure-white sky – literally and physically unmoored from time and place.
A THOUSAND SUNS (2013)
Her most stylistically sophisticated work up to this point, A Thousand Suns represents a huge leap forward in Diop’s development as a filmmaker. For the 40th anniversary of Touki Bouki’s release, Mati Diop travels to Dakar to explore the film’s enduring legacy, and to catch up with lead actor Magaye Niang. With a loving eye and a sprightly tone, she tags along as Niang (much older but still oozing charisma) delightfully bickers with his wife, haggles with cabbies, and brags about his glory days to a group of unimpressed school children. Niang’s brittle veneer of confidence cracks after a celebratory screening as his contemporaries lament his wasted potential. Once poised to take over Hollywood, Niang shied away from his success, staying in Dakar and eventually settling down as a cattle farmer. Peppering his story with poetic visual interventions, Diop paints an intimate portrait of one man’s life while at once capturing the essence of her uncle’s cinematic legacy.
ATLANTICS (2019)
An expansion on her 2009 short film of the same name, Atlantics synthesizes the best elements of her short filmography into a magical realist fable of remarkable depth and maturity. Hauntingly beautiful, her first feature length film is the tragic supernatural love story of Ada and Suleiman. When Suleiman – along with a group of local men trying to make their way to a better life in Spain, goes missing at sea – Ada (despite her impending wedding to the wealthy Omar) is crushed. Little does she know greater forces are soon destined to reunite them. Set on the Atlantic shores of Dakar, the ocean is a persistently powerful presence throughout the film, both comforting and menacing. Buoyed by an otherworldly score from Fatima Al Qadari and replete with stunning, painterly compositions courtesy of cinematographer Claire Walton, Atlantics often feels like it’s floating in a kind of liminal space. Somehow, however, Diop pulls off the neat trick of securely grounding this dreamy piece of work in the gritty reality of Dakar, delivering a detailed and lovingly realized vision of life in a time and place clearly dear to her heart.
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