Atlantics

Mati Diop's debut feature, awarded Cannes's Grand Prix, is a ghostly love story and woman-centered indictment of neocolonial labor exploitation. It begins with a sweet narrative of young lovers Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who is in the process of testing her adolescent autonomy, and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), a construction worker with his eyes set on Europe. Expanding Diop’s earlier short film Atlantiques (2009), the feature plays with genres, fluidly weaving in elements of police procedural, horror film, fantasy fiction and ghostly possession. A visceral denunciation of global capitalism, the film is a captivating story of economic precarity and gendered obligations in Dakar, hauntingly scored by Fatima Al Qadiri.