Screen/Society--"Atlantics" (2019) | Mati Diop

Film Screening:

"Atlantics"
(Mati Diop, 2019, 105 min, France/Senegal, French & Wolof w/ subtitles, Color, DCP)

Mati Diop's haunting debut feature begins in Dakar with a star-crossed love affair between two teenagers, Ada and Souleiman. When he and a group of exploited young workers disappear in the night in search of a better life abroad, a mysterious fever starts to spread among the women left behind. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

"Like PARASITE, its fellow Cannes honoree, it testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It's a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well." -- A.O. Scott, New York Times

"ATLANTICS is a film about being haunted, being spellbound, and the idea that ghosts are created within us. In the writing process, I realized that besides TOUKI BOUKI, by my uncle Djibril Diop Mambety, I hadn't grown up with any black couple figures worthy of Romeo and Juliet. Through Ada and Souleiman, I wanted to relate an impossible love in the age of rampant capitalism, a love obliterated by injustice, stolen by the ocean." -- Mati Diop

View trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhcXyK8s-io