CUSAS Film Outing: Atlantics

A film by Mati Diop (Arts Picturehouse tickets are £11.50)

With Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré

'Ada, 17, is in love with Souleiman, a young construction worker. But she has been promised to another man. Harnessing fantasy and social relevancy in this haunting tale of love, filmmaker Mati Diop made history, earlier this year, when Atlantics became the first film made by a woman of African descent to screen at Cannes’ (Cambridge Film Festival Website).

'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’ (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).

'Though all at once a forbidden love story, a piece of science-fiction and a brittle account of illegal migration, Atlantics is above everything a vastly enterprising piece of storytelling from Senegalese actor and filmmaker Mati Diop' (Beth Webb, BFI).