Set in Senegal’s bustling capital Dakar, Mati Diop’s Atlantics is mesmerizing, poetic and haunting. The filmmaker is the first Black woman to win a Jury Grand Prize at Cannes Film Festival. As the first frame of Atlantics was displayed on the screen, it became clear why this story stood out. Based on her 2009 short film of the same name, Atlantics follows Ada (Mama Sané), a captivating and headstrong woman banging against the traditional Muslim norms of her culture to speak for herself and listen to her heart.
Engaged to a wealthy but arrogant man, Ada longs for her true love Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), who has sailed across the sea in search of better work opportunities. As her wedding day looms –Ada becomes increasingly haunted by memories of her lover, despite her family and friends urging her to look towards her future. Atlantics isn’t just about love–greed, class status and politics are also themes in this film. The added layer of supernatural mystique only serves to draw the audience in further—leaving them enraptured until the very last moment of the film.
Ahead of Atlantics’ Netflix debut, STYLECASTER sat down to chat with Diop about her inspiration for the film, her filmmaking process, and what it has meant to be the first Black female Palme d’Or winner.
“Atlantics the short, was initially supposed to be a scene in a movie that became a short film,” Diop explained. “I was witnessing a lot of young people leaving the country for Europe. What was most striking, was not the fact that they wanted to leave, but how they were doing it. They were crossing the ocean by boat. That’s a real risk to your life.”
When Diop initially made the short film, she had no idea what would come of it. “The young man I filmed throughout the night who was crossing the sea– it was unclear to both of us what would happen,” she revealed. “His story was epic and poetic. That’s what I actually wanted to capture. I wanted to hear a crossing from the point of view of somebody who experienced it. But it needed to be positioned heroically. I wanted to make sure to add dimension to the story as opposed to how the media was treating these people. I was so sick of it. As a French Senegalese filmmaker with the tools of cinema, I decided to put my cinema at the service of that situation. It took me a little while before I realized that, but I knew I needed to continue to talk about this situation.”
Adding the supernatural aspect to her story was also important to Diop’s vision. “I was moved by the connection between reality and fantasy,” she reflected. “There was also a coherence as I was talking about a lost generation—a ghost generation. These people have disappeared in the ocean, trying to reach a better future. I felt that there was nothing better than using a fantasy film to talk about this ghost generation. I wanted to talk about loss, about being hunted by these boys in the neighborhood–to really feel the difference between their presence in the neighborhood and their absence, and how it just transforms the society and the women who stayed behind.”
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Image: Instagram.
