A Thousand Suns introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Mati Diop.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

February 6, 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened A Thousand Suns. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed, participating are filmmaker Mati Diop and HFA Programmer David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  0:18  

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this evening's screening organized in honor of the 15th recipient of the Geneviève McMillan - Reba Stewart Fellowship, the young filmmaker Mati Diop. Let me say a few words of introduction about the fellowship, about Mati, about the film we're going to see. The McMillan Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking was first established in 1997 at the Film Study Center here at Harvard, with a generous gift from Geneviève McMillan, in memory of her late friend Reba Stewart, and the fellowship goes to outstanding Francophone directors from Africa, or of African descent in order to support their work. Francophone Africa, thus including not only the Arab countries along the Mediterranean—Tunisia, Algeria—but the former colonies in Western and Central Africa: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and so on. Geneviève herself for those of you who didn't know where was born, Geneviève Lalanne in France, arrived here in Lexington as a war bride in 1946, and eventually settled in Cambridge, where she became a really important part of the cultural scene, especially here, especially around Harvard Square, but also in Boston. She was also a major collector of African art, and donated much of her collection to a number of museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts. And she lived here in Harvard Square and was a regular here at the HFA until her death in 2008. And so every year, when the when the fellowship is awarded, the recipient comes to Harvard to present his or her work here at the Harvard Film Archive, with the support of the Film Study Center, so that local communities can get to know the work, and also so that the filmmaker can interact with the communities of scholars, students and faculty here at Harvard, and other local institutions.

Tonight, we're showing the most recent and the longest work to date of the latest recipient Mati Diop. We're showing the featurette, A Thousand Suns, which dates from 2013. Tomorrow night, we'll be showing three earlier, shorter works by Diop between the years 2009 to 2012. And there are two other special events attached to those two screenings to which I want to call your attention. First of all, immediately after the screening and the conversation with Mati Diop, tonight, there'll be a reception in the lobby. So please stop on your way out, to have a drink and a snack and to discuss the film. And then on Monday, we'll be screening one of the classics of African cinema Touki Bouki from 1973 for reasons that I'll explain in a minute. But before I go on with the remarks, I want to remind all of you please, if you have anything on your person that might make noise or shed light, please make sure that it's turned off. Please refrain from illuminating those devices while the house lights are down.

There's also a number of people I'd like to thank for making this event possible. First of all, there's the current staff of the Film Study Center, specifically Director Peter Galison, Assistant Director Ernst Karel, and especially Program Coordinator Cozette Russell, who's put all this together, just as she's also become a mother. I think she's upstairs working on the reception right now. I also want to thank the representatives of the McMillan Stewart Foundation, who have helped manage this award with the Film Study Center and we're grateful to their help as well, particularly to Anne Marie Stein and Kibebe Gizaw. If we could have a round of applause for the folks in the Film Study Center and the McMillan Stewart Foundation. (I don’t know if any of you are here.)

[APPLAUSE]

Although over the years this award has brought many of the the most famous, most celebrated African filmmakers here to Harvard. One previous Senegalese winner was Ousmane Sembène, one of the fathers really of contemporary African cinema. And although the most recent winner is a master filmmaker from Mali—Omar Cheick Sissoko—any other recent winners have like Mati Diop have been residents of France whose work is often set in Francophone Africa and I'm thinking of Abdellatif Kechiche who was here a few years ago and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche. Some of you may remember him from a couple of years ago. His new film, incidentally, is just about to premiere in the Berlinale, in the Berlin Film Festival, and we're very excited about that.

But Mati Diop shares something very interesting and very special with the winner from a couple of years ago,Tariq Teguia. These two filmmakers are, I think, at the forefront of a movement that we see emerging in contemporary cinema, a movement away from the idea of national cinema or national filmmaking, towards cinematic projects that are quite explicitly about crossing borders—not just geographic borders between nations and even between continents, but also borders between fiction and documentary, and borders between kinds of storytelling and even kinds of emotions. Mati Diop has a number of moments in her films that present things where we'll feel conflicting emotions or we're not sure how to feel and I think that that uncertainty is at the heart of the project in her cinema that rotates around this question of home and around exile and also absence. So although Diop is based in Paris, both the earliest film of hers, which we'll see tomorrow, and the most recent, which we're going to see tonight, are both set in Senegal, a country to which she has family ties and deep roots. So those films are A Thousand Suns, as I said, and tomorrow night, Atlantique from 2009, which will open tomorrow night's shorts program.

Although she herself is still what you might call an emerging filmmaker, she's already amassed a formidable filmography, retrospectives at many different festivals and cinema techs, and a number of awards. Those of you who've seen Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum in 2008 may remember Mati Diop because besides being a filmmaker, she also works as an actor. And she appears in that film as really the central figure, the young woman who's the the daughter of Alex Descas, and who is leaving her father to marry Grégoire Colin. And it was around the time that she made that film that she began making her other short films. And maybe at some point, tonight or tomorrow, we could talk a little bit about Denis. I think you can see a relationship between Denis’ work and Diop’s work.

But tonight's film is, as I mentioned, a featurette. It's a length we rarely see outside of France, except for maybe some television documentaries. But a number of remarkable French filmmakers have used the hour-long featurette as a transition from making shorts to making feature work. And I'm thinking of François Ozon’s Régard la mer or See the Sea—which is a wonderful film—and a film that we showed here just about exactly a year ago, Alain Guiraudie’s That Old Dream that Moves. Just like those, A Thousand Suns has a richness and a depth that's belied by its length.

I should also mention that besides being a McMillan Stewart Fellow, Mati is here as a Radcliffe fellow writing the screenplay for her feature debut. So we have that to look forward to.

But the film that you're going to see tonight, is a remarkably original blend, I think, of fiction and documentary. It's a portrait of a man named Magaye Niang, living in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a port city on the Atlantic, on the west coast of Africa. And we meet Magaye Niang in Dakar on the day of a 40th anniversary screening of the film I mentioned earlier, Touki Bouki from 1973, now a classic African cinema. The film that we're going to see, A Thousand Suns is not so much about Touki Bouki, but about the passage of time about what's happened over the last forty years or so since the early 1970s—time that Magaye Niang spent in Senegal, although his female co-star and perhaps lover, Myriam Niang, had left for the US. So it's this gulf between then and now around which A Thousand Suns turns but also it turns around a key absence, which is that the filmmaker of Touki Bouki, Djibril Diop Mambéty, who was Mati Diop’s uncle, considered one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, and who died quite young in 1998 at the age of fifty-three. So we'll have plenty to talk about after the screening. Now I'll turn the microphone over for a few introductory remarks from Mati Diop herself.

[APPLAUSE]

Mati Diop  9:29  

Thank you very much. First, thank you very much for all being here. It's a very crowded screening room and makes me very happy. Of course, the first thing I want to say is to thank you very much, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and the Film Study Center team for his big big support of my films and my work. I feel very privileged and proud to be awarded this prize and [supported] by being this year also a Radcliffe Institute fellow. I'm very also happy to finally be able to share my work with my partners, the fellows at Radcliffe. It’s the first time my films are being screened here, except in a Film Study Center class last April. So I guess the main thing I want to say is a big thank you for all of your support and encouragement. It's also a great privilege to be able to have time here in Radcliffe to write my next feature, to have time. It's already a big luxury to wonder about future film I want to write and to have the possibility of meeting wonderful filmmakers and human beings as well here. Thank you very much to you, David, and Haden Guest. And also for making the screenings tonight and tomorrow happen. I'm also very happy that we have the chance to screen Touki Bouki, and you also have this privilege to discover this film if you haven't seen the film yet. So it's on Monday at eight. No, not at eight, at seven.

And about the film we're going to see tonight, I guess you've said already quite a lot. A lot of people consider this film an homage to my uncle and his film. I'm a bit—not embarrassed, but I don't feel it's an homage because, to me, the word “homage” sounds a little too compassionate. You will see if you discover Touki Bouki that the film is so free and independent that I don't feel it really needs an homage. It's more a conversation with another film, a dialogue that I wanted to open with this film. One of the first things I heard about this film from my father was that Touki Bouki was all of our history. And I kind of took this sentence literally, and decided to explore this film in order to explore my origins. And I'll be very happy to discuss with you about the film after. I hope I thanked everybody because I really mean it. I feel extremely supported and encouraged by this award, by this fellowship. And thank you for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  13:11  

And now David Pendleton and Mati Diop.

David Pendleton  13:20  

Please welcome back Mati Diop!

[APPLAUSE]

Perhaps I'll start by asking a question or two before we open it up to the audience. First of all, thank you very much for this film. This is the fourth time that I've seen it on the big screen. And every time I see it, I have this sort of different set of reactions to it. It's a wonderful, complex and constantly changing film, I think, with a lot of mystery, so much so that I don't necessarily want to ask you too much, ask you to explain things away. But I'm fascinated by the question of how this film was made. What are the things that you made happen? What are the things that happened while you were filming? Perhaps we could start at the beginning by talking about the genesis of making this film, for instance, was that anniversary screening something that was scheduled independently of you? Or was it something you made happen for the film? And did you have a script?

Mati Diop

That’s a lot of questions! [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton

Okay, I'll stop. You could pick any one of those or say something else, if you like.

Mati Diop  14:33  

Maybe I will start with the genesis question, the starting point.

It was in 2008, and I only had directed one short in 2004. It was right after my very [formative] experience with Claire Denis as an actress, which was very strange to me, because it was the first time I was acting and it really brought up a lot of questions about what it is to be inside a movie and how you experience your character after the movie is gone. And also, it was ten years after my uncle passed away. And it was the first time I was, I think, realizing this absence and also taking time to think about my relationship with cinema and the place cinema has in my family. And so all these questions arrived at a moment where I had time before rejoining a cinema school, time to go to Africa, to– I guess my desire for film suddenly connected with the need to look back at my cinema history in my family. And so I started to talk more with my father about Djibril, about his films, about how his [productions] were made at the time, and especially about Touki Bouki, because he had made two features and a couple of shorts, but Touki Bouki is the film that really marked me the most.

David Pendleton 16:30  

So your father was Djibril Diop Mambéty’s brother.

Mati Diop  16:33  

Yes, absolutely, and also his close collaborator. And that's when and how I found out about a lot of stories behind Touki Bouki and one of the wonderful stories I discovered was the story of the actors, who had, in a very strange and enigmatic way, followed the paths of their characters. So Magaye had stayed in Dakar, like he does in Touki Bouki, and Anta left first for France, then moved to New York, and finally went to Alaska. So that was a real story, which was shared and given to me as a tale. I mean, it was a real story, but the way I received it, the Romanesque and mythical dimensions of it were so powerful that I immediately started to consider this story as something that should be really pursued somewhere in a film, so it was really the starting point to continue the story where it had ended. And also, I felt that there was a extremely interesting bridge to build between the generation of my uncle and my father and mine, and that re-exploring Touki Bouki was a very exciting way to make these two generations [collide], not only politically, but cinematographically, and of course, I guess the even more important reason was in terms of identity, and it was also a very introspective process to me. It’s like reentering Touki Bouki was really a way, like I was saying to you to reinvent and to find also a place in my very legendary family story.

David Pendleton  19:03  

Well, it I mean, it's remarkable, as you say, and just to repeat—for people who haven't seen Touki Bouki—the ways in which life imitated the film, because Touki Bouki is about this pair of young lovers who are planning to leave Senegal to go to France. And at the very last minute, the man doesn't get on the boat, and the woman does, which is exactly the same thing that happened to the two actors. And so already this blending of fact and fiction exists in real life. And so in a way, by documenting this blend, you're just sort of giving another turn to the twist. I mean, what do you think of this film as a documentary at all? Were you working with a screenplay?

Mati Diop  19:45  

Like you just mentioned, the frontier between documentary and fiction was from the beginning the main theme of my film. Questioning this frontier was really one of the first points and themes of the film. So from the beginning this separation was not really a question, it was more something to dig into more than to– And most generally I've never really considered cinema as something other than the meeting between these two—documentary and fiction. For me, cinema has always been the meeting of these two genres.

David Pendleton  20:44  

Can we talk a little bit about your work with the image? Because you're listed as one of the camera operators and there's a second person. And it looks like some of the images are shot with this very sort of beautiful looking high-definition. And others are more rudimentary, like DV quality. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your choice to work in that format, as well as the choice to work digitally as opposed to with film, but also within the different kinds of digital imagery that you use.

Mati Diop  21:18  

I really started the film on my own. When I first went to Dakar in 2008, I didn't have a producer, I first wanted to meet Magaye Niang, the main actor of Touki Bouki, just to meet him, to see if a film was possible to make with him, also to provoke a conversation with between him and Anta, [and to scout some locations]. And in this moment of research and scouting, I already had my camera, a very basic DV camera that I had been using already for previous works. It was really before HD, and I was really interested by the very imperfect and dirty... um...

David Pendleton  22:08  

Quality?

Mati Diop

Métrage

David Pendleton  22:12  

Yeah, material. Footage.

Mati Diop  22:15  

So had been shooting a lot of images while I was preparing, so the visual identity of the film was already imposing itself. The scene in the slaughterhouse, for example, was just supposed to be a scouting moment. And as I was there, and it was obviously very intense, like something you prefer to do once and then... I was there with my cousin and I had a camera, some sound, and it happened that it was in a very miraculous way possible to shoot this day, so I shot this scene. And for maybe one or two years, I came back to Dakar to continue some research. And so by the time I finally wrote the script—because it took me five years to make this film. I directed several films in parallel. I didn't only work on this for five years; I did other films, but to find money, to grow also with the project, to learn how to make films…. And so when I proposed it to Hélène Louvart—who is a great French DP [whose work] I really admired—we decided to find a way to keep this visual identity that was already very strong in this film. And she proposed to me to mix film and DV, which could sound a little too literal, because of this apparent division between documentary and fiction. On paper, it would look a little too theoretical, but it ended up that it was really a way to incarnate the back-and-forth between the actor and the character. And so it was really a way to find also a central and a visual way to embody this. I also really wanted to try—not only through the script, but also through the image itself—to make a difference between the moments where Magaye is Magaye and where Magaye is so blinded by the film in which he is still not a prisoner, but stuck in.

David Pendleton  25:09  

He becomes sort of subsumed, we could say, by the film, right.

Mati Diop  25:13  

And also, shooting in film, in 35mm, was very– Because when you use these very light DVs it’s also to preserve more of a documentary way of shooting—very light and with very few constraints. And the 35 was also a way to impose the rhythm of the fiction in terms of how you shoot a film. It takes much more time, it's much [heavier]. And for some scenes, I really needed this weight, to use these constraints, for some scenes.

David Pendleton  25:57  

Now, did you know Magaye Niang when you were growing up?

Mati Diop  26:00  

No, not at all. No, no, no, I went to Dakar in 2008 to meet him. And no, I didn't know him at all.

David Pendlton  26:11  

And what about your uncle? Did you talk to your uncle about wanting to be a filmmaker? Did you know back then that you wanted to–

Mati Diop  26:17  

No, I was still a teenager when he passed away, so we didn’t talk about cinema at all.

David Pendleton 26:24  

Because I'm curious about this question of the exchange between generations that you mentioned also, which in the film centers on the conversation with the taxi driver? I don't know enough about contemporary Senegalese politics, but it seems to me that part of the difference between the two generations is this idea of a look back at that moment in the 60s and the 1970s, when there were lots of revolutionary hopes, utopian hopes, as opposed to today where the young generation often feel stuck or stymied. Is the same thing true in Senegal? Could you flesh out that context for us a little bit?

Mati Diop  27:08  

What has been extremely interesting is that during the five years I was working on the project, a huge evolution happened for the youth of Senegal. Because in 2009, for example, just one year after I began to prepare the film, I came to Dakar to start to meet some young people, who were actually the friends of my cousin who helped me a lot with this film, who are like around twenty. Between 2006 and 2010, a huge part of Senegalese youth left their country for Europe by very fragile boats. It was a phenomenon that took a massive dimension. And in a very different way that young people would want to explore all the places of the world, like in the 70s, where the gesture was much more romantic, whereas in the 2000s it was really huge and morbid and desperate.

David Pendleton  28:31  

It wasn't like traveling, it was really emigrating for economic survival.

Mati Diop  28:35  

What they would offer as the concrete and basic reasons were mostly social and economic, political, but from my point of view, I could also feel something that was that went further than economics; it was really like a profound failure—an identity failure as well. And then, a couple of months before I started to shoot for real Mille soleils, Dakar experienced what happened in Cairo or Tunis; we really can call it “Dakar Spring,” because the last president wanted to force a third term. People were already extremely unsatisfied with the president—a lot of unemployment, like 60% of the youth were not working—and the president wanted to put his son to direct– Anyway, so it was really a huge mess, and a little community of journalists, students, rappers and yeah, mostly students, provoked a citizen movement, a very, very important one. So this was a couple of months before I shot. So the youth I met while I was shooting Mille soleils was completely different than if I had shot it a couple of years before. And so it was even more stimulating to be able to [connect it to] a very similar relationship to [protesting], but in a very different political context.

David Pendleton  30:45  

Thank you. Yeah. Are there questions in the audience? I want to open it up now. There's a lot of things that I haven't asked about yet, because I figured some of you might want to ask about. If you do have a question, raise your hand. And we have people with mics on the aisles. Or while you're thinking about questions... Okay, there's a question right here, up front. Jeremy, you want to come up and hand a mic to this gentleman?

Audience 1  31:15  

Where does a featurette like this get to play in France? Do French audiences get to see this film more widely?

Mati Diop  31:22  

Where the film was…?

David Pendleton  31:24  

Like, has the film been seen in France? How was it seen?

Mati Diop

France?

David Pendleton

Yeah, yes.

Unknown Speaker  31:31  

The film came out on the screens, which is a fantastic thing, because it's medium-length, and it's a very difficult length to be distributed. And because it did really great with festivals and the critics in France, it could happen with a very special distribution company in France called Independencia that really supports these kinds of films—which is quite new, in France. This distribution company has also supported films by Ben Rivers and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. So it's really a special distribution company that still finds a way to give space to these kinds of films.

David Pendleton  32:42  

Can I? Are there other–? Okay, I'll hold off. There’s a question there in the middle, Jeremy.

Audience 2  32:54  

Could you walk us through your decision to frame the film with a Tex Ritter song and kind of how you saw your film in conversation with High Noon? Because it opens and closes with these images that do evoke the Western with the herding of the animals and the bright sunlight and so on. Not that it looks like High Noon, of course, which is black and white and High Noon is both the classic Western and a classic kind of anti-Western. So I know all those elements are there, but I wanted to ask you how you were trying to articulate them?

Mati DIop  33:24  

It was actually one of the other stories I've learned—asking my father about Touki Bouki—was that High Noon was a Western that was very often shown in Senegal in the 60s, because they used to play a lot of Westerns in the streets like the screening there. And I found out that it was the film that made my uncle want to make films. That was his very special film. And when he told me this, I hadn't seen High Noon and so I discovered it and I immediately understood how and why Djibril identified so much with the main character. And using High Noon in my film was a way to question the origin of a character in a film, to question where a character comes from. Because when I film Magaye Niang, I don't only film him, I also film my uncle through him, because he embodied his own role in Touki Bouki, and Touki Bouki is also deeply inspired by High Noon—embodied by Magaye’s character. So it was really a way to find an interior melody in all of these characters. And that's really the reason why. Then, I guess, it's even better when it can correspond with many other things such as spectres of foreign influences. Like, for example, when I was preparing Mille soleils, they're not here anymore, but in all Dakar still had in the 2000s these very, very old, huge Marlboro campaigns of cowboys from the 70s who are for reasons unknown are still there in the 2000s. And it was really strange in terms of the relationship with time. But the presence was really there. And these [advertisements] were huge and very imposing, which was even actually awkward, because you would think that they would mostly come from friends but it was from the US. Anyway, it was just a way to… No, I guess I answered. And I liked also the idea at the end to use the same song but the song is also transformed, like the song…. Ah! I’m sorry! It’s so hard to speak in English sometimes!

David Pendleton  36:35  

Feel free, if you want to slip in some French words, I'll try to help you...

Mati Diop  36:39  

[SPEAKS FRENCH]

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  36:42  

“I wanted the film to undergo the same…”

Mati Diop

–transformation and metamorphosis as the actor in the film. So much easier.

David Pendleton  36:49  

But that makes me want to ask you a little bit about... Just as there's the taxi conversation about the difference in politics in ‘68 or ‘73 and 2013, I feel like your film is also about the difference in cinema between 1973, let's say, and 2013. There's a way in which Touki Bouki, it seems to me, is so energetic and fresh and ambitious and that it's out to conquer the world in a way and I'm wondering what you think about looking back at cinema in 1973 versus today's cinematic world, whether there's the same kind of disillusion on the part that we hear in the taxi driver or whether you have hope for the future of cinema. You know, we talk about a “post-cinema” world sometimes in English.

Mati Diop  38:00  

I mean, about the conversation in the taxi, it was indeed a way to—through the conversation I provoked between the two, I also used the character of the taxi driver to ask questions myself because it's not only a political debate, it's also about cinema. It's also me asking the generation of my uncle and my father, “What did you leave us? What cinema are we supposed to be on now [that] there is no more?” which are mostly only questions I use my character to ask for me. And then, about the cinema today, I just look at the facts and it's it's a very complex and difficult situation for Senegal. There has been a golden age in the 60s and 70s and it seems like when you really observe the problems of cinema in the Dakar today, it seems like a… [SPEAKS FRENCH]

David Pendleton  39:47  

“It's by looking at the state of cinema in Senegal today that you can really see what the state of Senegal is post-independence and that in fact, it's there in the world of cinema that you can really see where things are now, for the nation as a whole.”

Mati Diop  40:07  

We can talk more precisely about it if you have a specific question, but it's also the state of Senegalese cinema today. It's also a big theme, and we can continue but it’s like–

David Pendleton  40:19  

Sure, sure, but I was also thinking about the state of cinema in the world today. And you as somebody who, as an emerging filmmaker, you know, what your hopes are, or if you have the same ambitions that that your uncle had when he was a young filmmaker, whereas so much has changed. I was just wondering if you had thoughts about...

Mati Diop  40:44  

I guess that any filmmaker has big ambitions. Not personally, but I don't think you start to make films without wanting to reinvent something or to [?discontract?] something or... And then depending on which part of the world you– Not, not only you make films but from which part of the world you... [WHISPERS TO DAVID]

David Pendleton  41:16  

Non, non, en français c’est bon...

Mati Diop  41:20  

Sorry, it’s really difficult to articulate sometimes in English while I think.

David Pendleton  41:27  

En Français c’est bon...

Mati Diop  41:31  

No, no, it's always a tricky question to compare the ideal that my uncle and people of his generation had and mine, because I don't wake up every day, wondering, “What are my ambitions for cinema?” I just try to write my script, and it's already a lot. [LAUGHTER] And also, I don't think, because I make films in Africa, I should carry in a very heavy way a cause, you know. It's already here. And whether I want it or not, the cause is already extremely clear. And so that's already enough. I mean, you know?

David Pendleton  42:22  

Yes, yes, that's an excellent answer.

Other questions from the audience? Oh, come on, I know that you guys have questions about things... Yes.

Audience 3  42:39  

Mati, thank you, that was really wonderful. I just was intrigued to hear you talk a little bit more about Claire Denis and her influence, because I thought I could see certain things and she's one of my favorite filmmakers, but you hinted at some things and didn't go into them and I would love to hear you talk a bit about what what her influence on your work has been.

Mati Diop  43:00  

My answer to this question is often very deceptive because it's always very hard for me to put the finger on what exactly she has transmitted to me as a director to her actress. I really [became] an actress for her in a very strange way. She is not a director who directs with a lot of words. It's very quiet. She just—in a very mysterious way—chooses you to become your character. So you become the character in her movie for a couple of months. And then it's very difficult to put into words what somebody transmits to you. Maybe I should make a film about this because I guess I really begin to make films when I don't have words to explain. And so, this is how Mille soleils began, how to put words on all these questions of heritage and these time travels and these cinema stories. So making this film was a way to try to understand and express these feelings. So I have been extremely marked by her as a woman, as an artist. Before I had the privilege to be her actress, I was already a big admirer of her work, but I would say it's less somebody who influenced me more than it is somebody I feel who is from the same planet too, in terms of our relationship to Africa, in terms of our relationship to cinema...

David Pendleton  45:18  

I mean, the geographical jumping towards the end of this film made me think a little bit—I suppose the most obvious example in Denis’ film is The Intruder, L’intrus. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you chose to put together the final sections of the film, because it seemed at the beginning, we have a thread, we follow it, we follow Magaye, we go to the screening, and then after his conversation with Anta, then things get much dreamier. At least that's one word that I thought of. And so could you talk a little bit about showing us Alaska before we even know why we're looking at Alaska and also the quotes about home and stuff from Baldwin in that conversation near the end.

Mati Diop  46:03  

To me, it was very important to anchor the film in the present, because it travels so much between past and now that it was very important to anchor the spectator and the story in the Dakar of today. And it's why the first sequences have a much more brutal relationship with [reality]. And for me it's really the screening—you asked me how it was done, and it was completely written and directed. And for me, the experience of Magaye seeing himself in the mirror in this screening was really the moment where the film turns into fantasy. Because I really wanted to insist on this extremely fantastic and magical experience of the projection. It was a very simple thing. I really wanted to express all the magic and the strangeness and the fantastic experience for this man to see himself forty years before on film. And for me it was really a passage to another dimension of time and of the film, and that's also why I decided to use all these clocks to really enter into another space and time and the more you advance, the more it becomes a tale… And thenm you asked me about the quote...

David Pendleton  48:11  

Yeah, well, I guess I asked you a few different questions. I mean the other thing was about talking about the end and the use of the Baldwin, and this question about home.

Mati Diop  48:19  

It's, I mean, I'm not going to comment on this quote. You don't need my comments. It's from James Baldwin and it's the most wonderful thing I've ever read about exile. I read Giovanni's Room a couple of years before shooting my film, and I was really amazed by his talents to put words on some feelings, and I hope it's mine to put them on screen. I wouldn't have been able to find the words to express this relationship with time and the relationship to what you leave and how do you come back? I just think those lines are vertiginous. And as he’s an African American writer, I thought was also quite dynamic that this quote belonging to an African film was from somebody that left this place. And I thought it was also a great internal dynamic inside the film that you had all these different voices from the diaspora in the same film.

David Pendleton  49:42  

Right, right. No, hearing you talk about this, I mean, I realize now, one thing we could talk about tomorrow, is that so many of your films—the three short films tomorrow—are often about displacement or moving in space. But this film, then yes, has the dimension of time, this sense of moving through time, which makes it such a marvelous sort of companion to your other films. That's really a comment more than a question. But maybe a thread we could pick up tomorrow.

Are there other questions from the audience?

Yes, please.

Audience 4  50:19  

Thanks so much for the film. I thought it was great. You mentioned before that working with a 35 millimeter camera, it was sort of bigger and heavier, and that you thought there were advantages to that. I was wondering if maybe you could just say a little bit more, what are the advantages of working with something like that, as opposed to the smaller cameras?

Mati Diop  50:43  

Your question reminds me that shooting in Senegal with a DV attracts a lot of aggression. People just want to hit you, because they feel really threatened by the presence of the DV. And it was incredible, because when we had a big 35 camera, people were extremely respectful and took us very seriously, because I think they were reminded of the time when there were great directors were shooting films in the streets in 35. And I think in a very unconscious way, it reminded them that this is cinema, we're not gonna end up on the internet or on TV. It was just interesting to feel the very, very different reactions from the people in the streets.

And, and besides this, I think I told you but maybe I wasn't clear enough about using 35 as a way to sublime the presence of Magaye in certain moments of the film, in the moments where he's still somewhere in a film. It's like two different tracks. One is here now and playing with this other track where Magaye is still living a life in a film that still haunts him or...

David Pendleton  52:28  

Right, the film has sort of like taken him, given him this other life, subsumed him in a way... when you say “sublime.”

Mati Diop  52:36  

Yes. And I was very sensitive to this idea of replaying something that you could not play in life, that cinema gives this place for the actors to continue something, that cinema is also a place where things that were not possible in life can find a way inside a movie.

Unknown Speaker  53:05  

Right, like a parallel world or a parallel reality kind of thing.

Are there any other questions? Yes. There's a question up front here.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

David Pendleton  53:38  

Let me just repeat the question quickly for people who couldn't hear. The question is about on the one hand, we have Magaye who's stuck in place, even though maybe he travels through time a little bit through the screening. But the question is whether Mati was curious about Anta’s experience having travelled through space and having gone to Alaska and the US?

Mati Diop  54:01  

Well, yeah, it's more than curiosity. She's the starting point of the film.

David Pendleton  54:11  

And we do go to Alaska, or at least somewhere where there's snow and ice.

Mati Diop  54:14  

Yes. No, no, I really insist, when I say that she's the starting point of the film. Her story is the thing that made me want to do this film, which actually put me in a very strange situation too, because in order to see if a film was possible to do, I went to Dakar and I provoked a conversation between Magaye who I just met– And she, at the time, was in Alaska in 2008 still. I provoked a conversation—with the complicity of Magaye—and we called her and she didn't know that I was recording. And I didn't do this in a manipulating way; I was just completely obsessed by this idea of experiencing this conversation and to see how real life and the script of Touki Bouki were going to rejoin. And then I made her listen to the recording like a year after—because I was also doing other things—and she got extremely mad at me, asking me who the [hell] I was to record her voice without letting her know. And when she told me this, I realized my very naive gesture in recording this without her knowing. And I realized that I tricked myself; I kind of considered her more as a character than as a person, which is, of course, not good or which is a mistake. But it's just to explain to you how, even myself inside the film, I would sometimes get lost. For me her story was so romantic in a very extreme way, that immediately when I was thinking about her for the film, it was already a character in my mind. And that's what she reproached me: “I'm not a character, I'm a real person.” And she kind of never forgave this. Because she then didn't want to be in the film. Also, I don't think she understood my desire to [divorce] her from the image, because I've always thought that her presence would be so much stronger if it was only a voice, a faraway voice, and I think she wanted me to make a biopic about her instead of just a voice, which I understand, but it was not my project. So we had very difficult and conflictual meetings when I met her in New York—because then she moved to New York. It was very very hard for me to face on my own this extremely charismatic and strong and super woman. You can imagine she left– She's in Alaska. And her telling me “I don't care about your film. I don't care about you making a film. I don't owe you anything,” and “Just leave me alone.” Yeah, the internal life of the movie was very intense and and brutal sometimes because I kind of entered in her life by complete... infraction? When you just come and steal everything?

David Pendleton  58:00  

Right, right. By an infraction. Yes.

Mati Diop  58:03  

And she made me pay for this. But it's also when she told me “No, I'm not going to be in your film,” that I [regained] a lot of freedom, because it's not necessarily good to be too dependent on a person when you make a film. But sadly, she won’t see the film. I mean, it was very bad.

David Pendleton 58:31  

Her character, in a sense, makes an appearance or there’s some sort of avatar of her. I'm assuming that the woman that we see in the ice fall is some sort of manifestation of Anta.

Mati Diop  58:42  

Of course. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

David Pendleton  58:46  

In the fantasy of Magaye, perhaps.

Mati Diop  58:47  

Yeah, absolutely.

David Pendleton  58:50  

Okay, are there any other last questions? If not, I invite all of you, first of all, to stop upstairs. Second of all, to come back tomorrow to see the three really remarkable and very different films that Mati made while she was making Mille soleils. And thank you for coming and thank you–

Mati Diop  59:07  

Thank you very much for being here!

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