Mati Diop

Mati Diop was in residence at LUMA Arles from april to june 2024.

Mati Diop was born in Paris on June 22nd, 1982. Since the early 2000s, she has built an eclectic body of work that has won awards at various international festivals. With her first feature film Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival followed by Dahomey (2024) awarded by The Golden Bear of Berlinale, she has established herself as one of the leading auteurs of international cinema and of a new wave in African and diasporic cinema.  

She grew up in a french-senegalese family, between a musician father, Wasis Diop, and a photographer and art buyer mother. She is the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the cult Senegalese film Touki Bouki(1973). Her nomadic, romanesque and political cinema which challenges the boundaries between genres and formats is an extension of her mixed identity.

Her formalist approach is rooted in an early curiosity for the fine arts, particularly video and sound. At the age of 20, she began working in theater, creating sound and video for plays. In 2004, she shot her first self-produced short film, Last Night. In 2006, she joined Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo’s artist-in-residence programme and research lab. After a brief passage at Le Fresnoy (National studio of contemporary art), she’s chosen to play the female lead in Claire Denis’ 35 Shot of Rum (2008). Her encounter with the French director confirmed her desire to become a filmmaker.  

And so begins the composition of a Dakar epic in three chapters that unfolds over a decade. Atlantiques(2009, Rotterdam Festival Tiger Award), A Thousand Suns (2013, FIDMarseille Grand Prix) and Atlanticsform a manifesto that signs a political choice: a cinema committed to Senegal, with its working-class youth as its beating heart. From the phenomenon of clandestine immigration that devastated Senegal's working-class youth to the deposition of the Wade regime in 2012, and the disappearance of Senegalese and, more broadly, African cinema, which golden age was embodied by the subversive and political work of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty, each film is an archive of an era and its contemporary issues. For the director, cinema is a tool of reappropriation to restore  missing images, question degrading colonial representations and invent heroes who have deserted the African imagination. 

In parallel, the filmmaker made several short films, including Big in Vietnam (2011, Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival) and Snow Canon (2012, selected at the Venice Film Festival), which explore recurring motifs and themes of her cinema : the solitude of exiled bodies, cities and landscapes imbued with mythology and mystery, and nights from which dances and ghosts emerge. These themes are echoed in Tokyo Trip (2023), produced for Chanel, and In My Room (2020), commissioned by Miu-Miu. She continues her video practice with Liberian Boy (2015) and Naked Blue (2022), co-directed with Manon Lutanie. Between 2020 and 2021, she also shot two music videos in Paris, for Bonnie Banane and Wasis Diop, as well as a commercial film with Solange Knowles.

With the creation of Fanta Sy, a film house based in Dakar, she pursues her artistic commitment on the African continent.