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Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen
What is Senegal exactly? Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen is a film about its people and, at the same time, a reflection on the conventions of ethnographic cinema. It shows the mechanisms of manipulation in the seventh art form, for example, what music makes the audience feel. In her debut film, Trịnh T. Minh-hà invites us to listen with the eyes and to see with the ears.
Bio Trịnh T. Minh-hà
Trịnh T. Minh-hà (1952) is a Vietnamese-US-French filmmaker, music composer, and writer whose work has continuously interrogated ways of relating. She grew up in war-torn Vietnam before leaving the country to study music composition and French literature in the United States and France. This education enduringly shaped her artistic career, just like her direct experiences of colonialism, armed conflict, and displacement. Between 1977 and 1980, she conducted field research in Mali, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) while teaching music analysis and theory in Dakar. There, she developed an interest in vernacular architecture and ethnographic cinema.
The space in which Trinh T. Minh-ha works and creates is where she confronts and leaves behind the world of beaten paths and traffic regulations. She seeks the in-between spaces where established boundaries can be rearranged and shifted, including those of the ‘I’. In each of her films, rather than as a source, the ‘I’ is deployed as an open site where other manifestations of the ‘I’ can take up residence and incongruous elements can converge.
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- This film was #28 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025