For the first time I encountered the French-Senegalese actress Mati Diop in Claire Denis’ profound relationships drama 35 Shots of Rum (2008), a film about the love between a father and his daughter. The year after, in 2009 she made her first short film with the title Atlantiques about two Senegalese friends doing a boat crossing looking for a better life in Europe. 

In her 2019 first feature film Atlantics, with which she became the first female black director ever to debut at Cannes, she returns to the same issues of love, loss, economic hardship and migration. It is a lyrical and mystical film, a film that optimizes all the components that the filmmaker has to her disposal to draw us into her haunting narrative. It has a compelling story, it has a wonderful, dreamy cinematography, it has a musical score full of emotions by the Kuwaiti musician Fatima al Qanari, and the sounds of the ever present ocean and of the wind are hypnotic. 

Atlantics places us into a context that is both familiar in terms of love, heartbreak and hope for something better and simultaneously very different from ours in terms of economic disparity and desperation and of the mythical, supernatural. It is so educative to see shared human issues come alive in a context so different from ours!

The film is set in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, located by the sea. It is a love story between Ada and Souleiman, who is a construction worker. Souleiman and his co-worker friends, who haven’t been paid for three months, decide to seek their luck elsewhere and set out in an open boat for Spain. The story is really about Ada, whose parents have arranged for her to be married with a man from a well-to-do family. She is unhappy, feels alienated in the relationship and her heart remains with Souleiman. At the wedding Ada is depressed. Her friend tells her that Souleiman has been seen in town and then strange and inexplicable things start to happen. 

There is so much detail in the story and so many themes are touched upon that I only can say see it for yourself! Then there might be a chance that you immediately want to see it again! 

Rinus, Dec 2019

*image posted under fair use of copyright 
material in recommendation of the film

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