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MATI DIOP: the Dawn of a Thousand Suns

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MATI DIOP: the Dawn of a Thousand Suns FILM AT REDCAT IS EXTREMELY PROUD TO CONCLUDE ITS FALL 2014 SEASON BY PRESENTING THIS EXCEPTIONAL PROGRAM Mon Dec 8 |8:30 pm| Jack H. Skirball Series $11 [members $9] MATI DIOP: The Dawn of a Thousand Suns Since first drawing attention for her stunning performance in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Mati Diop has emerged as a formally adventurous filmmaker who mines the edges between staged drama and creative documentary. The daughter of Paris-based Senegalese musician Wasis Diop and niece of legendary filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, Diop broke out with the Tiger Award-winning short Atlantiques (2010, 15 min.), an experimental ghost story that recalls the life-threatening attempts by Africans to reach Europe by flimsy pirogues. The program at REDCAT also includes Mille Soleils (2013, 45 min.), winner of top prizes at FID Marseille and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. A homage to Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), Mille Soleils follows that film’s main actor, Magaye Niang, 40 years later as he searches for Myriam—his co-star and great love at the time. In person: Mati Diop Presented as part of the Jack H. Skirball Series. Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud. http://www.redcat.org/event/mati-diop-dawn-of-a-thousand-suns “Diop has clearly emerged as a major cinematic talent, one whose unorthodox style has surprisingly garnered an impressive collection of awards along the international film festival circuit. Beautifully inscrutable, her films are exceedingly personal, drawn from memory, experience, and chance encounters. Drifting and dreamy, they proceed (sometimes haphazardly) like phantasms of the mind, travelling over bodies that are magnetically drawn together.” – Andréa Picard, Cinema Scope Atlantiques Senegal/France, 2009, 15 min, color Los Angeles Premiere Atlantiques is a ghost story, no less delusive than her young protagonists’ hopes for a better life in Europe. In the flickering glow of a bonfire, Serigne from Dakar tells a few friends the story of his voyage to Spain in an overcrowded pirogue; in the meantime, a gravesite bears witness of the fact that he actually drowned in the passage. – The Viennale Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns) France, 2013, 45 min Let’s not delude ourselves, inheritance is a choice. And a quite demanding one, too. This is precisely the journey young but seasoned filmmaker Mati Diop embarks upon here, by looking back at Touki Bouki, a cult film made by his late uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty in Dakar in 1972. The plot is simple enough: two lovers dream of a heaven they picture in Paris, and find ways to get there. One follows the dream and goes into exile, while the other chooses to stay at the last minute. A fable with burlesques hints, this Journey of the Hyena (the translation of Touki Bouki’s Wolof’s title) deals with choices: how you strive to be able to choose and then how, freed by your efforts, you do make a choice. In Mati Diop’s present journey, the story of his family is entangled with the history of cinema and the history of Senegal, as embodied by Magaye Niang, the protagonist of the original epic, to such an extend that temporalities juxtapose and 40-year-old characters make a come-back (along with their typical features, like the famous buffalo-motorcycle). Somewhere between naturalism and fantasy, tribute and investigation, humor and melancholy, Mille Soleils keeps the promise of its title, and shines with so many lights. – Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID Marseille Mati Diop, born in 1982, lives and works in Paris. She directed her first film, the 52 min narrative Last Night, in 2004, that was shown at the Cinémathèque française. In 2006, she joined the Pavillon artistic laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) where she made several videos: Ile artificielle-Expédition (2006) is selected at the Cinéma du Réel Festival in Paris and shown in a number of exhibition spaces (Espace Louis Vuitton and Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Delhi Cultural Center in India). She entered the contemporary arts studio in Le Fresnoy in 2007. She made Atlantiques (2009) that received the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival as well as a number of other awards in the Media City Festival (Ontario, Canada), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, US), the Cinéma du Réel. It was shown in competition in the Toronto, New York, Belfort, IndieLisboa and Corsicadoc film festivals. In 2010 she directed the short Big in Vietnam and in 2011 another short, Snow Canon, that was shown in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Her latest project Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns, 2013) is a homage to her uncle, the legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945-1998). She played the central role of the daughter in Claire Denis’s loose remake of Ozu’s Late Spring, 35 rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2008), for which she received the Best Actress Award in the MK2/Close Up Young Talents Festival. After appearing in Sébastien Betbeder’s featurette Yoshido (2010), she was cast as the female lead in Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer (2011). She is currently a Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow/David and Roberta Logie Fellow. “The world premiere of Mille soleils at the 2013 edition of the International Cinema and Documentary Festival of Marseille on July 6, where it won the grand prize for the international competition, confirms Mati Diop as a defining figure of new cinematographic forms. ‘The world is old, but the future comes from the past.’ Over and over again the griots repeat this beginning of the Sundjata epic. [Mati Diop] navigates through Dakar in the footprints of Touki Bouki, a film that touches her deeply but which her grandfather summarizes by saying, ‘It is our history.’ Here is a story of a family, of handing down, of heritage, of rupture, where personal history mixes with the grand History of cinema.” – Olivier Barlet, Africultures Read the entire article on: http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2013/07/mille-soleils- thousand-suns-by-mati.html Interview with Mati Diop (excerpts) “Mille soleils is a project that came from far away, born of an introspective quest, from questions about the importance of cinema in my life and that of my family, about the origins of my desire to make films, and also from my relationship with Africa. The project was born in 2008, shortly after the end of the shoot for Claire Denis’ 35 rhums, in which I act. It was an experience that profoundly affected me. It was also the year that marked the tenth anniversary of the death of my uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. It was a period in which I was led to think about and measure this loss, which resulted in long conversations with my father about the life and death of Djibril, on his films, especially Touki Bouki. This is when I discovered the thousand stories hiding behind Touki Bouki—our family’s history, but also the history of the film’s stars Magaye Niang and Myriam Niang. My film project was born in 2008 but I didn’t make it until 2013. It was therefore constructed in stages, alongside Atlantiques, Big in Vietnam and Snow Canon, the films I made between 2009 and 2012. After having found and affirmed my own cinematographic language, I was ready to make Mille soleils and to look Touki Bouki straight in the eye. It bears reminding that Mille soleils is a fiction. The sole element of reality that I kept in my film is that Magaye Niang stayed in Dakar and Myriam Niang left for Alaska. From there I took fictional liberties, but the phone conversation that is heard in the film remains quite faithful to the real conversation that I recorded between the two actors. Nothing is true and nothing is false in my film. The friction and two-way shuttling between reality and myth is the main subject of my film. I talk about exile, identity, and desire like intimate experiences because that’s what they are above all. In regards to the spaces, it’s the notion of territory that is important to me, as they are interconnected to the interiority and trajectory of a character. My characters rarely find themselves where they want to be in the world: there is always somewhere to escape from, to return to, or to conquer by means of the imagination. I know that acting has enormously enriched and rendered more concrete my relationship to writing and to my actors but I cannot precisely explain this relationship. My experience working with Claire Denis on 35 rhums has particularly affected me. I wouldn’t know where what she conveyed to me begins or ends. It’s huge. Claire is just as captivating as her films, as beautiful, as secretive.” Read the entire article by Andrea Picard and the interview on: http://cinema-scope.com/columns/filmart-realm-senses-mati-diop- mille-soleils/ Presented as part of the Jack H. Skirball Series. Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud. .
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