Date:
Location:
$12 Special Event Tickets - Free Admission with Harvard ID
Mati Diop in person
Friday February 6 at 7pm
Q&A w/filmmaker + reception
A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils)
Directed by Mati Diop. With Magaye Niang, Wasis Diop, Ben D. Beye
France/Senegal 2013, DCP, color, 45 min. French and Wolof with English subtitles
A Thousand Suns is a portrait of Magaye Niang, the non-professional actor who played the lead in the African film classic Touki bouki, which was directed by Diop’s uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Fusing documentary and fantasy in homage to her uncle’s masterpiece, Diop follows Niang to a screening of that 1973 film as the old man comes to terms with the vanished past he longs for and the future he still hopes is possible. A Thousand Suns was originally conceived in 2008, though it was not shot and completed until 2013. In the interim years, Diop made Snow Canon, Atlantiques, and Big in Vietnam. In many ways, A Thousand Suns is the culmination of those previous films, taking from Snow Canon its dreamy lyricism, the distant opportunities dreamed in Atlantiques, and the ruminative wanderings and regrets of Big in Vietnam. A Thousand Suns is also the most intimately entwined with Diop’s own family (in addition to her uncle’s film, it features her father, the musician Wasis Diop), the troubled history of Senegal, and its cinema. – GY