Ousmane Sembène’s first film uses a mixture of documentary and fiction techniques to tell the story of a young cart-driver in Dakar. The Wagoner illustrates the continent’s poverty, showing that independence has not solved the problems of its people.
Mati Diop’s experimental documentary Atlantiques is a precursor but also a narrative sidestep to what would become her feature debut, Atlantics, ten years later. A group of young Senegalese men discusses a possible attempt to cross the ocean to Spain.
A girl from a shantytown travels to the city to become an itinerant newspaper vendor. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernising capital of Dakar.
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.
