One Thousand Suns
Mati Diop
2013 - 45 min - 35 mm - Couleur - France

Let’s not delude ourselves, inheritance is a choice. And a quite demanding one, too, since it requires you to go back in time. This is precisely the journey young but seasoned filmmaker Mati Diop embarks upon here, by looking back at "Touki Bouki", a cult film made by his late uncle Djibril Diop Mambety in Dakar in 1972. The plot is simple enough: two lovers dream of a heaven they picture in Paris, and find ways to get there. One follows the dream and goes into exile, while the other chooses to stay at the last minute. A fable with burlesques hints, this "Journey of the Hyena" (as translated from the Wolof) deals above all else with choices: how you strive to be able to choose and then how, freed by your efforts, you do make a choice.
In Mati Diop’s present journey, the story of his family is entangled with the history of cinema and the history of Senegal, as embodied by Magaye Niang, the protagonist of the original epic, to such an extend that temporalities juxtapose and 40-year-old characters make a come-back (along with their typical features, like the famous buffalo-motorcycle).
Somewhere between naturalism and fantasy, tribute and investigation, humour and melancholy, "Mille Soleils" ("One Thousand Suns") keeps the promise of its title, and shines with so many lights.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID 2013)