Discoveries from Senegal World Cinema

An unusual Tangana tenant observes in his mysterious restaurant, the incessant ballet of the beings that populate the city of Dakar.

Idrissa lives in the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal. As a result of budgetary restrictions imposed by the IMF, then headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, he lost his job as a civil servant. Since then, Idrissa has been looking for work, without success. His pride as an African man is all the more affected by the fact that he is now entirely dependent on his wife, Viviane, who somehow manages to support the family through her medical practice. Aminata (Idrissa and Viviane’s daughter) and Moussa, two young students in love with each other, also see their lives disrupted by the economic situation imposed on the country. After yet another humiliation, Idrissa, who holds Strauss-Kahn responsible for his misfortune, decides to go and see a marabout to prepare his revenge…

Four junkyard kids go into town looking for something to cure their hero, Grand Batche. On the way, they come across various symbols of society: the cop, the mayor, the postman, the madman, the artist...

“Sooner or later, I’ll return to where my other self is.” The everyday experiences of a Senegalese student in West Berlin are marked by a sense of uneasiness in Europe and his family’s expectations in the form of a constant stream of letters.

Ken and Jeeli are two 12-year-old children. Their greatest desire is to explore the city. So they decide to run away from the island of Gorée, where they live with their families, and head for Dakar. A ruthless world awaits them, but they soon befriend other children who work odd jobs. All expelled from Dakar, they migrate inland. The journey is long and exhausting. They finally arrive in an abandoned village, where they meet an old shepherd who becomes their mentor. Thus, the children's republic is born.

In the heart of colonial Senegal, moving to the devastating battlefields of Europe during WWII, Awa and Ibrahim are a young couple whose lives are upended by war. Their love story takes a tragic turn when Ibrahim is conscripted and later presumed dead in 1940. Driven by love and hope, Awa embarks on a perilous journey to Paris in January 1942, seeking any trace of Ibrahim. She finds refuge in the Paris city mosque, alongside Jews evading Nazi persecution. However, her quest leads her to Auschwitz, where, in a twist of fate, she miraculously finds Ibrahim alive.

A forty-year-old woman refuses to give into the stigma of unwed motherhood and climbs the ladder of success in a male dominated field.

Dakar, Senegal. Ousmane, a 7 year old child, begs in the streets. He decides to write a letter to Santa Claus.

In a rural African village poised at the outer edge of the modern world, a teenage girl hatches a secret plan to rescue her 11-year-old sister from an arranged marriage.

Traana-Temporary Migrant is a theatre script written by Bouba Touré in 1977. The play tells a story of rural exodus, from the countryside to the city, from the city to Europe. This story of migration from the 60’s and 70’s indexes the failure of the liberation movements in Senegal and Mali to consider the postcolonial conditions for peasants after independence. The adaptation of Traana by Kàddu Yaraax and Raphaël Grisey in December 2016, is the result of a ten-day workshop with 8 actors coming from Yaraax or other suburbs of Dakar.

Taxi Sister is a documentary about Boury, a female taxi driver in Dakar, Senegal. As a woman behind the wheel she leads a busy life filled with everyday drama, and constantly grapples with society’s view and expectations on women. The film is based on the Taxi Sister project, which was started by the Senegalese state in 2007 with the aim of encouraging female entrepreneurs. Ten women were offered the opportunity to get a drivers license and buy a car on credit. Today there are fifteen women taxi drivers in Dakar, which is nothing compared to the fifteen thousand male taxi drivers.

It all started with a dream: "It's time for you to try to explain the mysteries! Find the griot who'll bring you to me, and when you recognize me, circle around me three times, rub me with buttermilk, and let me know what you want. But be careful: don't forget the buttermilk!" That's how I was drawn into the boabab's spirit. It was in the year 2000. The year of the "Sopi". If the boabab was Senegal's emblem, through the tree, I should understand the country.

The theme of the rural exodus has inspired many African authors. In the past, by tradition, the young peasant went abroad temporarily to earn the money needed to settle in the village. Now, he leaves the countryside with no idea of ​​returning, convinced that he will find all the means to make his fortune in these mirage cities. Issa, in turn, takes the road to the capital. Before leaving, Aminata slips a bronze bracelet on her arm as a token of loyalty and love. Then begins for Issa the inexorable chain of disillusions, bad luck, misunderstandings

Director Alice Diop was born in France of Senegalese parents. After their death, she felt the need to explore her roots. Armed with her camera, she went to spend a month filming the daily lives of the women of her family whom she had never met: Néné and her two daughters Mouille and Mame Sarr.

This film poses the problem of the emancipation of women in Senegal through the intersecting story of three young girls from the same family. Raised differently, they will not meet the same fate.

An intriguing look at an authoritarian state on the verge of democratization: how Zimbabwe got a new constitution. Two political enemies are forced on a joint mission to write Zimbabwe's new constitution. The ultimate test that will either take the country a decisive step closer to democracy and away from President Mugabe's dictatorship, or toward renewed repression. In a country with little respect for human rights, impeded by economic sanctions and hyperinflation running rampant, failure is not an option.

Recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world, we explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together. Founded in 2008, it set out to explore our planet's identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

An experimental short that explores a surfer’s belief in Animism.

Ramatoulaye, a 50-year-old teacher, has been married to lawyer Modou Fall for 25 years. The couple is very close and happy. When her husband takes a second wife – her daughter's best friend – a struggle between tradition and modernity begins.

Adama Coly, a young recruit to the Senegalese judicial police, is assigned an investigation: the murder of the Joola madwoman, the sole survivor of the tragic shipwreck. Between doubts and false leads, this seemingly mundane case will profoundly shake Adama...

On the Senegal River, a fisherman makes a strange encounter. A film that addresses the essential relationship between man and his environment.

The Cry of the Sea is about the struggle of a mother, Yaye Bayam Diouf, who lost her only son in a dugout (or boat) for the Canary Islands. Today, all her life in Thiaroye sur Mer is devoted to fighting against clandestine immigration. The Cry of the Sea is also a heartfelt cry, a singular point of view of a scourge that has claimed the lives of more than 3000 young Senegalese

While on vacation in Bordeaux, four-year-old Lili and her brothers, aged nine and twenty, are left to fend for themselves when their flamboyant mother goes home to her restaurant-disco business in Gabon without them. Torn between the desire to return to her lost paradise and the duty to seize the chance to make her mother proud, Lili grows up developing strategies to survive, find success, and return to the bright lights of her native Africa.

Guinaw Rail, a forgotten neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar, is emptying out. Bulldozers are demolishing houses along the route of the ‘Train Express Regional’, the symbol of President Macky Sall's “Emerging Senegal”.

In the community of Saint-Louis in Senegal, the installation of a Chinese merchant is causing a stir. Souleymane, a young Senegalese employee in the store, tries to calm the situation, which becomes increasingly explosive as the red dust invades the neighborhood, exacerbating resentments and unfounded accusations.

'Two Kinds of Water' is a documentary produced by award winning journalist and director Dan McDougall, highlighting the safety challenges faced on a daily basis by small scale fishers in Senegal, West Africa.

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 disembodied machines towards a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of emergence for such improbable algorithms?

Following a misunderstanding, a traveler is mistaken for an important official on an inspection tour. Nothing will be spared to coax him into turning a blind eye to the prevarications: embezzlement, exactions of all kinds practiced by the local notables.

After a parasite has contaminated all of Dakar's drinking water supply, a private pharmaceutical company develops pills to neutralize it. Meanwhile, a poor young man can no longer afford his pills. As the days pass without his treatment, he realizes that he had never been so lucid before.

Two new co-wives are alone in a house. The husband is away. They don’t want to talk to each other; at the same time, the voices of two other women in a TV documentary tell us about their own experiences of polygamy.

To inspire striking workers, the griot tells of a legendary prince, Dieri Dior Ndella, who sacrificed his life during colonialism, and Koura Thiaw, an entertainer who took up the cause of oppressed domestics in the 1940s, both becoming heroes to their people. Though this strangely lyrical film deals with a contemporary crisis, critic Roy Armes notes that "the film travels exuberantly through time to capture situations linked only by their common concern with the concepts of honor and dignity, the importance of keeping one's word and not being bought or corrupted.

Upon returning to Gandiol, his native Senegalese village, after 8 years of being a migrant in Spain, Mamadou seeks to be a positive force for his community. Assisted by his wife Laura, who came from Spain to Senegal, and under the gentle gaze of Yaaye Khadi, Mamadou’s mother, they start sharing and building with their community the “active utopia” expressed in the book Mamadou wrote while on his journey.

Issa cherishes those moments when he can lie on his bed daydreaming. But as day breaks, work beckons, and he ventures out into the noisy streets of the big city. What should he do? Accept his fate or wait for salvational enlightenment?

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before, during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.

In April 2006, a small boat was found drifting aimlessly along the eastern coast of Barbados. Local fishermen left the boat alone for many weeks, assuming it had something to do with drug smuggling. It later emerged that the boat contained the bodies of 11 Senegalese people who had set out to Europe four months earlier. In Senegal, it is not unusual for young people to embark in a rickety vessel in search of money and happiness in Europe or North America.

Part of a series of 4 films, Kinshasa (2018), Shenzhen (2019), New York (2019) and Dakar (2018), the project explores the relationship between digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism and the re-enchanted notion of a Non-Aligned Humanist Utopia. The four films of Core Dump are rhizomatic assemblages of found footage, performance documentation and recorded interviews that form narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of the digital earth. The films are fragmented arrangements of images and sounds, with each chapter forming links across geographic and temporal discontinuities.

A documentary work on Senegal's DUNNIART collective, showing the lives and experiences of creatives and artists who share their work with pride and resilience.

A young unemployed man fends off accusations of laziness and makes a home for his pregnant girlfriend who has been rejected by her family.

Tokara wants to marry his cousin, the beautiful Nafi, bringing their fathers into conflict with one another. The youngest brother is a clergyman, while the other is a candidate for Mayor of the small town in Senegal. The struggle seems to be all about the children, but gradually it transpires that the children are pawns in a bitter dispute. Can their family ties help them overcome these ideological differences?

The film is a poignant personal memory quest that begins at the Bay of Diamant, in Martinique, and carries us to 3 continents, to shine light on what it means to be black today in a globally interconnected world, as seen through the eyes of Martinican artist Laurent Valère and his transatlantic dialogs with the black diaspora.

Two young Senegalese boys are determined to see one last film at the town movie theater before it closes forever. When they fall short of their goal, Baba’s loyalty to Sembene will be tested.

VIRGO is the story of an artist named NIX, known in his country for his music but also for his tumultuous relationships with women. He decides to make a spiritual retreat in Casamance (south of Senegal), but his last love affair haunts him regularly during his stay. This is an immersion in the thoughts and memories of an artist visibly torn, who tries to rebuild himself with the pieces of a break-up.

Idrissa is a rebellious little boy who drops out of school and joins a gang of hooligans that live on the beaches of Dakar. He gradually becomes detached from his family and adopted by his new friends who initiate him into the art of theft and the pleasures of yamba, marijuana.

Shocked by French président Nicolas Sarkozy’s claim that the African man has no history, filmmaker Cheikh N’diaye sets out to prove his royal heritage – tracing his grandfather’s path from Mauritania to Senegal, homeland of his warrior ancestors.

We hear the thoughts of Amy, a girl from a rural area of Senegal who works as a domestic for a well-to-do family in Dakar. She complains about her employer, who continuously criticizes her and gets on her case, and she talks about her dream of one day opening her own eatery. In Dakar, some 150,000 young women work as housekeepers for rich families to survive and help their families instead of going to school.

Researcher and audiovisual artist Janilda Bartolomeu presents a film that depicts the dreams of the Cape Verdean diaspora. It is a personal, poetic reflection on the shared heritage and potential future of the archipelago and the Cape Verdean communities in Rotterdam and Dakar.

In Wolof, ‘Goor-Jigeen’ means male/female, by generalization ‘gay’ and akin to an insult. In Senegal, being homosexual is punishable by law and could mean five years of imprisonment. This documentary tells the story of people for whom the journey to Europe is the only choice.

First iteration of a three part curatorial essay made in Dakar in August 2020. The project explores the rhetoric of black and African folklore and the politics of who is invited to tell origin stories.

A trendy taxi-driver races through the streets of Dakar. His passenger is a western, blonde young lady who doesn't seem in the least interested in her surroundings. He tries to catch her attention and breaks the silence by saying: 'I can even see the wind pass by.'

Forty-year-old Babou Diop lives with his son Sada, his wife Coumba and a sheep they raise in the house. At nine, Sada ends up forming a very strong friendship with the sheep. A few days before the Tabaski holiday, Babou realises that his sheep, which is intended for sacrifice, has disappeared—and so has his son. In great distress, he sets out to find them, which he eventually does—a reunion that is not without its consequences... Now, Babou is faced with a dilemma.

Maodo returns to his home in Nouakchott after a long trip. He resumes his old job as a traveling merchant to support his family. One night, the young family man returns late, which deeply worries his wife and son, who wander around the city looking for his whereabouts.

From the coast of Gorée, director Arma Gòo embarks on the "Kumba Kastel", with a troupe of the island's best storytellers, dancers, singers, actors, fire eaters, and acrobats. He wants to go to the Cinecittà studios in Europe to shoot an epic musical. Their journey takes a tragic turn.

A young boy from an affluent family has the experience of a lifetime after his first day of school.

An African immigrant finds Paris to be other than the stereotyped image of the city.

In a near future, the villages of a Sub-Saharan area have all been deserted. Mad and disabled people as well as child soldiers are the only ones who remain on those dry lands. In this survival atmosphere, relationships are harsh.