“Beautifully inscrutable, Diop's films are exceedingly personal, drawn from memory, experience, and chance encounters.”-André Picard
French filmmaker Mati Diop was born into a life of radical cinema. Her uncle was the legendary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty and her father, musician Wasis Diop, composed soundtracks for films by his brother and others. She came to film first as an actress in Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum. When she began directing, Diop purposefully sought to use low-grade technology as a means of resisting the standardization of high-definition images and to create her own aesthetic identity. One of the pleasures of her films is that they reside ambiguously between documentary and fiction, allowing her to reveal her characters' dreams and longings. Diop has reflected, "I talk about exile, identity, and desire like intimate experiences because that's what they are above all."
We are delighted that Genevieve Yue will join Diop in conversation on two evenings. An assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, Yue is a coeditor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture and contributes regularly to Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and The Times Literary Supplement.