Quote:
In 2021, 26 objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey leave Paris and are returned to present-day Benin. How should these art treasures, stolen from ancestors, be received in a country which has reinvented itself in their absence?

Dahomey.2024.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-Kitsune.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 8 min
Size: 	4.09 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	8 275 kb/s
BPP: 	0.160
Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 320 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B877713BBF3CB76/Dahomey.2024.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-Kitsune.mkv

Language(s):English, French, Fon
Subtitles:English, English (SDH), German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Turkish

The post Mati Diop – Dahomey (2024) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Made during confinement, In My Room plunges us into the poignant story of a woman at the twilight of her life, through recordings of the director’s deceased grandmother. Living rooms become stages where life is performed. Windows become portals to the lives of others.

1.28GB | 19m 59s | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/EA162DD2B552477/In.My.Room.2020.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-MZABI.mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:English, French, Italian, German, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Spanish (Castilian), Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Simplified)

The post Mati Diop – In My Room AKA Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales #20 (2020) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Buried beneath all the ballyhoo over Netflix’s premiere of “The Irishman,” another one of this year’s finest films slipped onto the streaming service with little fanfare last Friday. “Atlantics,” the debut feature from world cinema royalty Mati Diop made history earlier this year by being the first movie directed by a black woman ever invited to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it went on to win the Grand Jury Prize.

A sequel of sorts to Diop’s 2009 documentary short “Atlantiques,” this is a slippery, spellbinding movie thick with atmosphere and longing. Set in Senegal, the story starts as an arresting ethnographic study until it takes a hard right turn into the mystic. With unerring confidence behind the camera, “Atlantics” steadily grows into something ever more mythical and strange — like a seaside campfire story told by old sailors’ widows. You might think you know where it’s going, but you don’t.

The luminous Mame Bineta Sane stars as Ada, a young woman from a modest background and a strict Muslim family, 10 days away from an arranged marriage to one of Dakar’s wealthiest bachelors. But she’s secretly sneaking around with Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore) a construction worker currently being swindled out of his wages by a crooked real estate developer, laboring on a ghastly tower complex that looms over the quaint cityscape like an ugly affront. The young men of the town are owed months of back pay — some have to sneak home at night to avoid their creditors — and Diop shoots the initial conflicts with corrupt management in a rough-hewn, handheld fashion familiar to films chronicling class struggle.

But one can already sense something dreamy about the camera’s tendency to drift away to long, lingering shots Diop and cinematographer Claire Mathon lavish upon the North Atlantic, with waves undulating in time to a hypnotic synth score by Future Brown’s Fatima Al Qadiri. The sea is full of secrets here, especially after Souleiman and friends steal away without warning in the middle of the night, attempting to emigrate to Spain and find steadier employment. Their boat is soon swallowed up by the waters, a tragedy conveyed by Diop via heartbreakingly evocative shots of all the girlfriends now sitting alone in a beachfront nightclub, their grief illuminated by the glow of green disco lasers and pale cellphone screens.

A devastated Ada tries to soldier on with her wedding, and Diop scores some sly visual commentary by isolating her alone in the frame, silenced and invisible underneath an ornate nuptial veil. (She looks like part of the furniture.) But before the marriage can be consummated, their bed spontaneously combusts. This is just the first of many strange occurrences that begin happening after dark in Dakar, as local girls succumb to a fever and start sleepwalking late at night. The uncanny events are investigated by a prickly rookie cop (Amadou Mbow) who suddenly finds himself suffering from strange fainting spells.

It’s with great pathos and unexpected humor that “Atlantics” veers into supernatural thriller territory, Diop tipping her hat to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 classic “I Walked with a Zombie” while keeping hold of her own very contemporary concerns. That the movie is able to so effortlessly juggle issues of labor exploitation, gentrification and a young woman’s coming of age within a patriarchal religious culture is testament to the sumptuousness of the filmmaking, which prioritizes sensation over subject matter. “Atlantics” washes over you like a dream, the meanings and interpretations of which can be picked apart later, after you wake up.

Diop is the niece of the late, legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose wild 1973 masterpiece “Touki Bouki” was recently restored as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. In 2008, she made her screen debut starring in my favorite Claire Denis movie, “35 Shots of Rum,” and I suppose one can spot the influences of both upon “Atlantics,” along with a more supple sensibility all her own. The movie’s rhythms and spaces allow room for mystery, as the tale takes root in your mind and lingers for days after you’ve seen it. The lyrical finale quite appropriately takes place in that aforementioned seaside disco, which is half inside, half outdoors — its chintzy decorations offsetting a majestic view of the ocean, the sublime and the tacky intermingling alongside the living and the dead.

2.93GB | 1 h 45 min | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/A81FC4FCCFFC6DF/Mati_Diop_-_(2019)_Atlantics.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/8C219DFCE1E4AE1/Mati_Diop_-_Atlantique_AKA_Atlantics_(2019).srt
https://nitroflare.com/view/97B4F9582441096/Mati_Diop_-_Atlantique_AKA_Atlantics_(2019)_FRA.srt

Language(s):Wolof, French, English
Subtitles:English,French

The post Mati Diop – Atlantique AKA Atlantics (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The film accompanies Magaye Niyang, a star of Touki-Bouki, a 1972 classic directed by her own uncle Djibril Diop. Following this path, we are witness of Niyang travel to a special screening of the film, which has a public release in his old town. Niyang seems detached and with a heavy longing from the past, and therefore, the film debris permeates everything with unescapable sorrow and fascination.

Diop film is, first and foremost, a nostalgic travel through memory, time and recreation. It is also a watermark in contemporary experimental documentary, a very intimate portrait of a lost long journey through the past that isn’t returning anymore, a detachment of rejected fame, recognition and connection which is heavily grounded on a legacy that belongs to the past, and that connects directly to a country (Senegal) and its heritage, which is sometimes feel excruciating for the old ones (a testimony such as the taxi scene in the film, where the cab driver longs for changes, and claims that the old generation had done nothing for that).

Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns) and, in itself, Mati Diop’s crucial talent, should be a point of reference into what could easily be one of the most interesting proposals of hybrid documentary cinema which has come from France, and which deals with a strong African heritage. Since 35 Rhums, where she proved her actress talent, Diop seems like a true promise for the following years of cinema.

Source: DesistFilm

Quote:

“This fever is a nightly invader that strikes the patient during deep sleep. He jumps off his bed and runs to the bridge. There, he believes seeing beyond the waves, trees, forests, flowered meadows. His joy erupts in thousand exclamations. He experiences the most burning desire to flow into the ocean.” — Atlantiques

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” — James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I think I’ve heard this song before.”

“Sure. And you will hear it again. There will always be somewhere to sing you this song.” — Mille soleils

While the waves, awesome and terrifying, are continuously invoked, even summoned, throughout the entirety of Mati Diop’s breakout short film Atlantiques (2009), the ocean is shown only once, under the title presumably bearing its name. Its mysterious pull, its promise of both life and death, its magnetic glimmer at night remain lodged in our imagination, as the sound of crashing waves becomes accompaniment for a mythic tale told around the crackling embers of a burning fire, where young men gather to relate their life-threatening attempts to reach Europe on a pirogue. Inspired by the real-life experiences of young African men who have made or contemplated such perilous journeys, Atlantiques renders its subject in elliptical fragments, within an abstracted spatio-temporal realm charged with a mournful yet restlessly hopeful intensity. With astonishing economy, Diop creates in a mere 15 minutes a sensual, intimate, seemingly timeless tone poem about friendship, family, identity, fear, courage, and longing—in another word, exile. And even as death haunts her hushed fever dream, the film gently refutes the idea of finitude with its seductive glances and hovering resolve.

Now five short and medium-length films (and a number of artist videos) into her career and with a feature film on the way, 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. Why surprising? Because barring certain exceptions (the Apichatpalme, or the Locarno winners, for example), such nonconformity is rarely recognized in such large forums, and certainly not consistently. Diop’s films radically challenge and upend standard narrative construction—their mid-length running times alone suggest a rhythm and pace at odds with convention—and aside from the 2011 Snow Canon, which was shot on 35mm with a professional cinematographer, her work can appear both coarse and fragile to eyes increasingly accustomed to homogenous high-definition. Porous but never poor, her images create textures and sensations that trace or partake of the inner conflicts of Diop’s characters, transforming tangible places into metaphysical microcosms: Atlantiques’ transcendent flickering campfire somewhere in Africa; a hot-box luxury chalet in the foothills of the Alps in Snow Canon; a verdant suburban Marseille in Big in Vietnam (2012) that surprisingly melds into an urban, nocturnal transcontinental drift; a dusty road in Dakar whose onscreen mise en abyme magically leads to the misty snowscapes of Alaska in her most recent and most ambitious film yet, Mille soleils.

Beautifully inscrutable, Diop’s 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—“the triumph of the flesh,” as Diop once put it—whether it be for comfort or lust (or especially the interstice where the two meet), or in order to access distant lands (“the life faraway,” reads a tattoo on the arm of the karaoke singer in Big in Vietnam) that are remembered, yearned for, or fancifully concocted. As if enveloped by a flushed, hallucinatory heat, her films emanate steam even in cold climes. Above all, they are nakedly human, peopled by characters who are fearful yet resolute, consumed by desire and full of gumption, who ultimately interrupt the seemingly helpless flow of their lives by taking risks, by fleeing, by exercising their intuition and, most importantly, by being vulnerable in their solitude.

Source : Cinema-Scope (full interview on link)

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D01AA5BD02337BB/Mille_soleils_AKA_A_thousand_suns_%28Mati_Diop%2C_2013%29.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/4D0895D0C70A4A5/Mille_Soleils_English_Subtitles.srt

Language(s):Wolof
Subtitles:French hardcoded,English srt

The post Mati Diop – Mille soleils AKA A thousand suns (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.