The French-Senegalese filmmakers Cannes sensationAtlanticsis a migrant-ghost story for our time.
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Between Senegal and the Canary Islands stretch almost 1,000 miles of ocean.
Cruise ships cut through the waves like knives.
But luxury tourism almost always involves a contortion of optics.
The club might as well be a funeral home; its as if the boys were dead already.
If nominated, which seems likely, it will be the first Senegalese film to vie for the award.
If it wins, it will be one of only four African films to have clinched the prize.
Ambulance sirens drone in the distance, occasionally spliced with the shrieks of a jackhammer.
We decided to go for a walk.
Diop, I quickly discovered, can conscript nearly anyone into a collaborative mode of speech.
She gestures profusely and speaks in long, swollen sentences, only to pause before uttering her final word.
Diop invites the participation.
It can get into really basic, even primitive, communalism, she says.
Help me!, she squeals, laughing at herself.
But we dont know what youre going to say!, exclaims the interpreter.
After a beat, Diop demurs: Its all about point of view.
FilmingAtlanticswas also a joint effort.
I need them to have experienced it, so when they act, its about them.
Ibrahima Traore, who plays Souleiman, is a construction worker by trade.
Theres a lot of providence inAtlantics, she tells me.
(Al Qadiri herself almost drowned when she was 10 and is terrified of the sea.)
Mati is a bit of a witch.
Mati Diop was bornin 1982 in Paris.
Nevertheless, France, she tells me, was not ready for35 Shots of Rum.
French viewers didnt understand how a film with a black man could not have as its subject his blackness.
I just think about me as me.
The quote was an error of translation, she says.
I was like,Is it really gonna be like that?
People are gonna ask me if Im black or not black?
I dont know, Diop says, laughing.
When she began making films in Senegal at the age of 26, Diop encountered an apathetic audience.
Nobody around me in Paris was really interested in Africa, even filmmakers.
I felt quite marginalized at the time a bit isolated, actually.
Two are set in Dakar.
Soon, cinema-verite bleeds into fantasy.
It is depressing and fascinating at the same time, Diop said then.
The unbearable lightness of the mainstream.)
From the documentary impulses of Diops previous works,Atlanticsspins a fantasy of retribution.
(As she speaks, I feel her tug my shoulder in an attempt to divert my path.
And voila I feel that there is a certain audience forAtlanticsthat didnt exist ten years ago.
And I know exactly what theyre talking about, she says.
The lack they describe is one of the stories of my life.
There isnt really an entry for people to misunderstand.
The translator offers a few suggestions: Misinterpret me?, Give me trouble?
To mess with me, she says with a wink.
