Atlantique Frankrike-Senegal-Belgia 2019 Regi Mati Diop Med Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré 1t 46m DCP Wolof & fransk tale, engelsk tekst Aldersgrense 12 år
The first film from the Into the Mirror chapter of the Vampiric Projections, is Mati Diop’s Atlantique, from 2019. The movie, set in a beachfront town in Senegal, brings a refreshing and insightful treatment of mirror manifestations in cinema.
Film critic B. Ruby Rich wrote the following about Atlantics:
“This is a film that is about magic. It’s about good magic and black magic. … It’s about the in-between spaces, between here and there, between Europe and Africa, between those who are alive and those who are dead, between the past and the present and in a way between documentary and fiction.”
This chapter sets from the canonical absence of the vampire’s reflection in a mirror, with a selection of films that venture into alternative – and not necessarily explicitly vampiric – territories in this context.
A vampire in the same room as a mortal casts no mirror reflection to the latter’s eyes, because the vampire is there and not there at the same time. They, the un-dead, un-belong to 2 realms: they are not dead, but also not alive.
In the video essay project Vampiric Reflections Oscar Debs is working on, there are instances where a vampire can cast a reflection in the mirror.
Not only this, but a vampire (or even a phantom) can transform the image considerably inside the mirror. In successive gradations: at the first level, the mirror image can become distorted/unstable, and at a next level, it de-figures and disem-bodies the undead/revenant…
Oscar, who’s also working on the parallel curation branch Vampiric Projections at Cinemateket Trondheim, will follow the screening with a short analysis of Atlantique in the abovementioned framework.
Suggested readings:
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