Atlantique

In 2012, when French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop pitched her anticipated debut feature Atlantique as part of Locarno’s Open Doors initiative, the film went by the title Fire Next Time. While much in the film has changed in the time between its initial conception and its recent Grand Prix as part of the Cannes Competition, it’s worth considering the words that precede the abandoned title in its original Biblical citation (by way of an American Civil Warera spiritual): No more water.

While set on land, water reappears constantly throughout , its presence at times blissful and dreamlike, at other times nightmarish. Diop punctuates her film’s narrative with extended shots of the sun or moon reflecting on the slow, rippling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and while in the film’s English title, to the lead character, changed from Adel in an earlier pitch to the palindromic Ada (Mama Sané).