The mission of the Centre d'art et essai de la Cinémathèque québécoise (CAECQ) is to primary program Quebec-made documentaries and independent fiction, as well as international documentaries, animated and foreign films, while encouraging opportunities for meetings between the public and the artists. Its programming is presented in conjunction with the Cinémathèque québécoise’s under the label New releases.
Winner of the Golden Bear, 2024 Berlin International Film Festival
Senegalese entry for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Award
November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.
Mati Diop
Since the early 2000s, Mati Diop has built an eclectic body of work that has won awards at numerous international festivals. Her first feature, Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, established her as one of the leading figures in international arthouse cinema and of a new wave in African and diasporic cinema. Her nomadic, lyrical and political cinema crosses boundaries between genres and formats, as an extension of her dual identity and proud Creoleness. The formalism of her cinema is rooted in an early curiosity for the arts, particularly video and, above all, sound. At the age of 20, she shot her first self-produced short, Last Night (2004), and she confirmed her desire to become a filmmaker when Claire Denis casted her as the female lead in 35 Rhums (2008). Atlantiques (2009), Mille Soleils (2013) and Atlantics form a manifesto that substantiates a political choice: militant cinema in Senegal, whose working-class youth will be its beating heart. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, Dahomey (2024), the director’s second feature, shot in Benin, focuses on the restitution of royal treasures looted during colonisation by France, reaffirms her artistic activism on the African continent.
Bio: MUBI
Photo: Henry Roy
