Mati Diop’s feature debut forces young Senegalese lovers to choose between love, duty and servitude, then adds a surreal twist
‘Some memories are omens,” says the heroine of this intriguingly ruminative and poetic movie from Mati Diop, making her feature film debut in the Cannes competition after an acting career that notably included work in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum in 2008. Atlantique is in fact developed from a documentary short Diop made 10 years ago; she directs and co-writes with Olivier Demangel.
Atlantique is a Voodoo-realist drama, or docu-supernatural mystery, whose dimension of strangeness is unself-consciously baked into the movie’s ostensible normality. But this doesn’t undermine the pertinent things it has to say about the contemporary developing world. It’s a winter’s tale of a film.