Mati Diop to receive “Le vie dell’immagine” Award

Mati Diop will receive the “Le vie dell’immagine” Award, now in its fourth edition and presented by Cinematografo in partnership with Giornate degli Autori. The award will be presented on September 10 at 3:30 p.m. at the Sala Laguna of the Casa degli Autori.

Following Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Albert Serra, the award, created to celebrate artists who expand the boundaries of cinema through a cross-disciplinary approach to the image, goes to Mati Diop, the French-Senegalese filmmaker and artist whose practice spans cinema, visual arts and installation, with a particular focus on themes of memory, identity, and colonial history.

Her cinematic work moves between documentary and fiction, reality and the fantastic. With Atlantique, presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, Diop became the first black woman director to compete for the Palme d’Or, winning the Grand Prix. In 2024, she won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale with Dahomey, a documentary about the restitution to Benin of 26 works of art looted during the French colonial period.

It is in Mati Diop’s ability to bring cinema and visual arts, memory and imagination, history and the present into dialogue that the originality of her artistic journey – and the motivation behind the “Le vie dell’immagine” Award – can be found: a practice that, through different forms and languages, contributes to expanding the boundaries of contemporary cinema.

Mati Diop is a French-Senegalese filmmaker born in Paris in 1982. Since the early 2000s, she has forged her own cinematic language. 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 one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary 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 and starring in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Mati Diop rooted her filmmaking in Dakar. Shot in Wolof, Atlantics (2009) recounts migration as lived experience, through a Gothic tale. A Thousand Suns (2013) explores the intimate and political legacy of Touki Bouki, revisiting an unfinished history. For her, cinema becomes an act of restitution and reclamation – bringing erased stories into view 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). 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.