Atlantique

A deep sigh of yearning can be felt throughout Mati Diop’s debut feature, which is haunted by love and loss, by departures and eternal returns. Her film begins with the harsh reality of power inequality: young men on a towering construction site are cheated out of their wages, leading some of them to seek better fortunes across the perilous ocean. Diop then shines her light back on the women left behind, coping with heart-stopping grief and becoming their own sort of agents of justice. The film touchingly zeroes in on one teenage girl, Ada, suffering in sadness and hounded by police. Building upon the hybrid experiments of her short and mid-length works (such as A THOUSAND SUNS and BIG IN VIETNAM), the French-Senegalese filmmaker melds ghostly, detective, and romantic elements. Her Dakar is inscribed with not only the quotidian realism of streets and homes, but also the ethereality of dream-like days, numinous nights, and the ever-mesmerizing sun and sea. “I like to set my films in the hyper-present, in order to make the past and the future circular,” Diop once told Film Comment. Her ATLANTICS breathes with a richness of texture one might feel in revisiting a classic, decades later. (Nicolas Rapold)

In the presence of Mati Diop.