About

This session features Mati Diop's award-winning feature film Atlantics 2019 preceded by her short film of the same name. Atlantics 2009 was produced ten years prior and both films touch on similar themes of migration, longing and the supernatural.

Atlantiques (Atlantics) 2009

“Look at the ocean. It has no borders.”
“Yet, it offers no branches to hold on to.”

French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop blends documentary and fiction in her haunting short film Atlantiques. Three friends talk around a fire, their conversation turns to Serigne’s failed voyage to Spain. His desire for a better life and dream of finding work across the water remains strong. While the ocean voyage could bring freedom and opportunity, the journey across that vast expense is a treacherous limbo between life and death. Diop explores contemporary migration and the despair of young Senegalese unable to find work. Ten years later she revisits these pressures and longings in her award-winning debut feature film Atlantics 2019.

16 minutes | Ages 12+

Atlantique (Atlantics) 2019

When I started writing, I realised that besides Touki Bouki, I hadn’t grown up with any black couple figures worthy of Romeo and Juliet. Through Ada and Souleiman I wanted to relate an impossible love, in the age of rampant capitalism. A love obliterated by injustice, stolen by the ocean.
- Mati Diop

In a dusty Dakar, Ada, 17, is in love with Souleiman, a young construction worker but her family have promised her to another man. The couple’s passionate, clandestine love affair is not enough to hold back the inevitability waiting for them: Ada must face a loveless marriage and Souleiman must leave Senegal undertaking the treacherous ocean voyage to seek work in Europe. Mati Diop’s Atlantics is infused with tones of the horror genre and ghost stories, a triumphant film simmering with love, the politics of migration and loss.

Atlantics premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2019. Mati Diop became the first woman of colour to have a film screening in competition. The film won the 2019 Cannes Grand Prix prize.

104 minutes | M | Coarse Language, Nudity, Sex Scenes, Supernatural themes