Atlantics’ French-Senegalese filmmaker, Mati Diop, also celebrated as the first black female director in competition at the festival, has used magic realism to tell her story of immigration and exile. Incidentally, no female filmmaker has ever outright won the festival’s prestigious top honour (Jane Campion shared it in 1993 for The Piano).
It was in 2009, on one of her visits to Dakar, that Mati Diop’s vision of the ocean underwent a significant transformation. The French filmmaker-actor found Senegal, the country of her origin, in the midst of a crisis. “A lot of young men were fleeing the country for economic reasons. They were crossing the sea to reach Spain for a better future,” she recollects. The ocean was the vital link to the land of promises and possibilities.
Call of the ocean
Meanwhile, the filmmaker in her began to imagine things in a ghostly dimension. “If you are ready to face the ocean, it says a lot about the despair in the situation, the reality of the present that you are stuck in,” she says, diminutive and dainty in a black T-shirt and beige trouser suit. A different image of the ocean reached out to her — that of a grave — stemming not just from the tragedy of the present but compounded by the atrocities of the past. “Atlantic Ocean as a grave is not something recent in the story of humanity,” she says, recalling slave trade, colonisation and other brutalities in history.
In the times of a massive media focus on illegal immigration, she felt it was necessary to use the tools of cinema to touch upon individual stories and motivations and harness them as a collective consciousness. That is how her début feature film, Atlantique (Atlantics), a fictional adaptation of her documentary short of the same name, came about. It makes her the first black woman in the history of Cannes Film Festival to be in the race for the Palme D’Or this year.
Of fantasy and exile
The love story of Ada and Suleiman in Atlantics gets hauntingly underscored with magic realism; he leaves her to return as a ghost. “I realised that if I had to write a story about this lost generation it had to be a fantasy film,” she says.
Atlantics is about men who go away in search of a better life but also looks at the other side of the refugee crisis — the women left behind, in exile themselves as they wait for the men to return. It is about the transformation of young Ada. “It is the journey of this girl, her progressive liberation from the haunting and the obsession. A bit like a ritual,” says Diop. However, for her, the stories of the girls begin with the disappearance of the boys: “There wouldn’t be any story to tell if the boys hadn’t disappeared.”
Taking the leap
Diop, who made her acting début in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, has chosen young actors, all non-professionals, picked off the streets. Mame Bineta Sane, who plays Ada, has herself lived in a Dakar suburb affected by immigration. “You can’t learn how to direct actors from any book,” says Diop, adopting an “intuitive approach” with them herself.
Born in 1992, Diop says that Arab Spring is the first revolution that she ever witnessed. “It impacted my engagement with cinema. It reminded me of all the young out on the streets to protest; my cinema should be impacted by their vitality.” Six months after Arab Spring, Dakar also had an uprising. It was very unexpected. Senegal is not a country known for its revolutions. “But I could connect very strongly with the country at that time,” says Diop, whose mother is French and father, musician Wasis Diop, is from Senegal. Her uncle is the famous filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety. She was born in Paris which is where she continues to live.
The connect with Senegal and her father’s family in Dakar has been strong enough for her to have kept going back and explore her origins. “I felt the need to root my cinema in Dakar more than in France,” she says, “All the time I have spent out of Dakar has nourished me to go back there. My African origins and cinematic origins are very linked.”