After a long tour through film festivals, which has taken
Atlantics from Toronto to Cannes and Stockholm, Netflix will stream the movie worldwide starting November 29. In addition to that, Senegal has selected it as the country’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the upcoming Academy Awards. The full-length film is based on her previous short film,
Atlantiques (2009), which tackled Africa’s migration issue first-hand.
However, Diop’s first feature film gives the first idea a twist by combining the documentary narrative – the socio-political commentary, this time, from the perspective of the woman who stays in the land – with a rather poetic and mystical approach tossing elements like voodoo, ghosts, love and tragedy into it. At the 30th
Stockholm International Film Festival, we sat together to depict her winner stint, the tension between the fictional and non-fictional, and the importance for a novel filmmaker to achieve such recognition with a first feature.