Atlantiques
2009 · 15m · France/Senegal
Directed by Mati Diop
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A group of young Senegalese men sit around a fire on a beach in Dakar, talking about attempting the deadly pirogue crossing to Spain. Shot on grainy mini-DV, the film is an intimate, haunting meditation on migration, exile, and the friends lost at sea.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mati Diop on grainy DV around a campfire turning a migration testimony into a ghost story — and the people in it really are ghosts. Quietly one of the most haunting documentaries of the 2000s.
Diop's grainy mini-DV fireside testimony established the aesthetic she would later expand in her feature; the sense of those lost at sea hovers like a Sebald paragraph. Vimeo gates it for rental, but the work is essential.
Mati Diop's grainy mini-DV around a beach campfire turns testimony into ghost story - she's already finding the language that becomes her feature. The Vimeo On Demand page confirms 15 minutes, but the title appears region-locked.
Reviews
With astonishing economy, Diop creates in a mere 15 minutes a sensual, intimate, seemingly timeless tone poem about friendship, family, identity, fear, courage, and longing—in another word, exile.
A small, haunting documentary about refugees shrouded in shadow and video grain, urgently and elegantly addressing the perils of illegal migration.
Festivals
- Rotterdam International Film Festival 2010, Tiger Award for Short Film
- Cinéma du Réel 2010, Louis Marcorelles Award - Special Mention
- Media City Film Festival 2009, Top Prize
- Ann Arbor Film Festival