Manthia Diawara

Senegalese documentary about the country's most famous film-maker - Ousmane Sembène. The groundbreaking director explains his philosophy, politics and hopes for the future of African cinema.

“In 2015, Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo released the acclaimed feature documentary SEMBÈNE!, on the life and career of Ousmane Sembène. For the following short documentary, the filmmakers have assembled footage from interviews that were not included in the original film, including musician Youssou N’Dour, activist and author Angela Davis, author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, filmmaker Clarence Delgado, and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara” (Criterion Collection).

Yari Yari -- Black Women Writers and the Future: An International Conference on Literature by Women of African Descent was held at New York University in October 1997. Yari Yari means "the future" in the Kuranko language of Sierra Leone, West Africa. It was the first major international literary conference of its kind, featuring such renowned writers as Edwidge Danticat, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Werewere Liking and Sapphire. The video documents selected scenes from panels, readings, and performances during the conference.

Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) by Manthia Diawara reflects on the life and work of the North American activist Angela Davis. Diawara’s camera follows Davis as she walks through a forest of giant sequoias, works in the garden or walks her dog, while reflecting on myriad issues, including ideas of freedom, resistance, rebellion, remaking our world, political blackness, radical black thought, music, (inter)nationalism, (Global South) feminism, abolition, the industrial prison complex, generational shifts, dialectics, contradiction, Africa, sexuality, desire and also friendship. The film is neither a biography nor a fictional narrative. Instead, Diawara’s footage, which is interspersed with relevant archival material, presents itself as a poetic compendium of Davis’s critical thinking and an inspiration for new imaginaries and new relations within an emergent new world.

In Senegal, Yene was traditionally a seaside town with many fishermen and farmers but has in recent years been troubled by coastal erosion and urbanisation. In conversation with the town’s community, Manthia Diawara explores how their lives contribute to the undermining of their shared environment.

Manthia Diawara's film follows the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant on a transatlantic journey as he discusses his philosophies of creollization, relation, and history.

Malian filmmaker and New York University professor, Manthia Diawara critiques visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch.

Conducted in 2016, this interview with filmmaker and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara (“African Cinema: Politics and Culture”) analyzes Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film.

Mali born Manthia Diawara's documentary is a complement to Ângela Ferreira's artistic project on the Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé, which was shown at the Venice Biennale 2007.

In An Opera of the World, Malian scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara reflects upon the refugee crisis and the relationship between Europe and Africa. The film revolves around a 2008 performance of Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, by Zé Manel Fortes with a libretto by Koulsy Lamko, in Bamako, around which Diawara builds a story about migration, interweaving interviews with documentary and archival footage. In the course of the film, one crosses into the world of opera from the tradition of sung wisdoms and sentiments, which has characterized West African culture for centuries. If opera is often understood as an über-European art form—the Gesamtkunstwerk invoked by Richard Wagner—Diawara chooses to meditate on its movement or migration as opposed to its expansion or totality. What happens when opera moves south, from Europe to Africa, just as so many people from that continent are moving north, in search of better lives?

In 2003, Manthia Diawara visited Guinea-Conakry to see what was left of the artists and intellectuals of the Guinean Cultural revolution, and how its citizens of Conakry were coping with globalization.

AI: African Intelligence explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from disembodied machines towards a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of emergence for such improbable algorithms?

In this 2016 piece, filmmaker and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara (“African Film: New Forms and Aesthetics and Politics”) addreses the significance of Ousmane Sembène's debut film.

Actor Danny Glover and director Manthia Diawara travel through West Africa from Goree to Dogon, creating conversations that link different sides and accounts of the African diaspora.

Based on archive material, Manthia Diawara organizes an imagined dialogue between Léopold Senghor, one of the founders of the concept of Negritude, and Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.