Poverty can only be explained in the light of wealth: nothing in the light of everything. The film begins on a civil construction site, a site of the future, except the future isn’t for everyone: luxury chooses its children. On the outskirts of Dakar, a great tower of glass grows tall: a finger raised against the sky. (A middle finger: the contractor hasn’t paid his workers for three months running). Unable to dream and escape upwards (to the tower), there is only one route left for these young futureless men: forwards. To the sea that watches the whole city, like a handkerchief flapping in the wind.

But before all that: after independence from France, in 1960, the film industry in Senegal achieved many firsts. In 1963, Ousmane Sembène shot one of the first short films made by a Black African man, one of the first narrative films made south of the Sahara. This beautiful film, Borom Sarret (in English: The Wagoner), is a line drawn across the city: a fable about the poor and the rich. The moral of the story (as the aforementioned contractor well knows) is that the latter can always take advantage of the former: with impunity.

Perversely, this and subsequent films by Sembène (the perfect La noire de… and Mandabi, both other firsts: the first Senegalese feature film and the first film in wolof, the most widely spoken language in the country) had to be recognised by the Europe of festivals and critics. On YouTube there is an excerpt from an interview with Sembène. The (French) interviewer asks: “Are your films understood in Europe?”. Sembène responds (in French): “Europe is not my centre. Europe is on the periphery of Africa. They were here for more than a hundred years and they never spoke my language, but I speak theirs. For me, the future does not depend on being understood by Europe. (…) Why should I be the sunflower that turns towards the Sun? I myself am the Sun.” The question that Sembène raises is: who decides what deserves to be seen, who determines its direction (and why is it always the West)?

Mati Diop is French-Senegalese, the daughter of two countries separated by an ocean: the same one that separated the metropole from the colony. In 2008, she returned to Dakar as an adult after much time away. During those years, many young people had left by sea to go to Spain in search of work, to survive: “Barcelona or death”, they said. Viewed from Europe, migration is reduced to a question of numbers (what matters is fear of the total): we count the many who arrive, the others who (for political reasons) are barred and returned to their countries, and all of those who die at our doors. Mati Diop says something very interesting about the title of the film: about the idea of a point of view. For European countries, migration is a problem of the Mediterranean, yet, for those leaving Senegal, before arriving at this sea surrounded by land there is another, larger ocean to cross. (And many never make it: because the sea swallows up its dead).

At the same time, Diop asks whether the value this generation puts on life in Europe (compared to life in their country of origin) might not indicate a colonial wound yet to be healed (an open, bloody sea). It is worth saying that Senegal learnt how to see itself as a new country through film. Mati Diop is the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, who, in 1973, directed Touki Bouki. In that (also perfect) film (with which this and other films by Diop enter into dialogue), two young lovers prepare to run away to Paris. They make fun of the wealthy, laugh at them. The difference is that back than no one ran away through desperation, but rather through a dream: the world was out there. Today, people escape to the sea when they can no longer live on the land.

Even so, Mati Diop says: “I didn’t want to talk only about the young people who leave and come back, because there are also young people who stay” (who make the country). Despite being about migration, the film is not about those who leave, but those who stay watching the sea. (Love between the carriages). Once again, this idea of recentring: of how we read stories. When we say (without saying much) that the film has fantastical elements, which jump beyond the real, we are allowing our reading to be compromised: because fantasy is a narrative code (and cinematic, too) defined in the West, with a body of stories that are deemed possible (since they are impossible). We ignore the fact that African reality has fantasy within it: that the line between the two (reality and fantasy, life and death) is much, much thinner.

Mati Diop says that this film is about haunting. I won’t tell you what happens in the second half of the film, because I want to leave you with the possibility of being haunted. Let us just say that the ocean that takes things away is the same ocean that brings them back. A body full of ocean. Throughout the film, it is the ocean that speaks, that fills our ears with waves. Herberto Hélder opens two of his books with these verses by Henri Michaux, from a poem titled “Telegram from Dakar”: “We talk to the beheaded/the beheaded answer in Wolof”.