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Bozar is giving free rein to Malian director Souleymane Cissé, who has chosen to show his films alongside Mati Diop’s Atlantique and Dahomey.
Atlantique, Mati Diop’s first feature film, is a magnificent, moving fantasy tale. In a working-class suburb of Dakar, the workers on a building site, who have been without pay for months, decide to leave the country by sea for a better future. Among them is Souleiman, who leaves behind the woman he loves, Ada, who is promised to another man. A few days after the boys set sail, a fire devastates Ada’s wedding party and mysterious fevers take hold of the local girls. Issa, a young policeman, begins an investigation that will turn out to be extremely surprising.
Mati Diop was born on 22 June 1982 in Paris. Since the early 2000s, she has been building a mutant body of work that has won awards at numerous international festivals. With her first feature film Atlantique (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival, followed by Dahomey (2024), winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, she has established herself as one of the leading figures of international auteur cinema and a new wave in African and diasporic cinema.