LE VIE DELL’IMMAGINE AWARD
MATI DIOP

(photo by Manon Lutanie)

After Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Albert Serra, Mati Diop will be honored with the Le vie dell’immagine Award, now in its fourth year and assigned by Cinematografo in accord with Giornate degli Autori. The award ceremony will be followed by a talk with Maria Bonsanti.

Mati Diop is a French-Senegalese filmmaker born in Paris in 1982. Since the early 2000s, she has built a body of work at the crossroads of documentary and genre cinema. With her debut feature Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by Dahomey (2024), awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival (both shortlisted for the Academy Awards), she has established herself as one of the leading figures of contemporary auteur cinema. She grew up in a family of visionary artists, between her father, composer Wasis Diop, and her photographer mother. She is the niece of filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose film Touki Bouki (1973) remains a landmark of African cinema. After an early practice in the visual arts (artist-in-residence at the Palais de Tokyo in 2005 before a brief period at Le Fresnoy) and starring in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Mati Diop anchored her filmmaking in Dakar with Atlantiques (2009). Shot in Wolof, the film recounts migration from the perspective of those who live it, unfolding as a Gothic tale. Amid the ruins of a golden age of African cinema, A Thousand Suns (Mille Soleils, 2013) explores the intimate and political legacy of Touki Bouki. For her, cinema becomes an act of restitution and reclamation – bringing overlooked narratives into view, telling them from within, and reshaping African imaginaries. Alongside her feature films, Diop has continued to explore short and medium-length filmmaking in France through Big in Vietnam (2011), Snow Canon (2012), and In My Room (2020, commissioned as part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales). She also works with video, co-directing Liberian Boy (2015) and Naked Blue (2022). Her films are shaped through an ongoing dialogue with musicians of her generation, including Fatima Al Qadiri on Atlantics, Dean Blunt on In My Room, and Dev Hynes on Naked Blue. In 2022, she founded the production company Fanta Sy in Dakar to support new cinematic voices across the African continent.