Khady Sylla

When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.

Can madness be described? Is it possible to express the pain that it entails? In 1994, when she was about to fall prey to her illness, Khady Sylla met Aminta Ngom, who exhibited her madness freely, without fear of provocation. During her years of suffering, Aminta was her window to the world.

We hear the thoughts of Amy, a girl from a rural area of Senegal who works as a domestic for a well-to-do family in Dakar. She complains about her employer, who continuously criticizes her and gets on her case, and she talks about her dream of one day opening her own eatery. In Dakar, some 150,000 young women work as housekeepers for rich families to survive and help their families instead of going to school.

Can madness be described? Is it possible to express the pain that it entails? In 1994, when she was about to fall prey to her illness, Khady Sylla met Aminta Ngom, who exhibited her madness freely, without fear of provocation. During her years of suffering, Aminta was her window to the world.

In this meditative and elegiac portrait, Senegalese filmmakers Khady and Mariama Sylla record the tales of their grandmother, a griot (storyteller) who is one of the last repositories of their culture’s oral tradition.

Can madness be described? Is it possible to express the pain that it entails? In 1994, when she was about to fall prey to her illness, Khady Sylla met Aminta Ngom, who exhibited her madness freely, without fear of provocation. During her years of suffering, Aminta was her window to the world.

Public vans provide the traditional and sole means of city transportation in Dakar, Senegal. In a frenzy of activity, from the outskirts to downtown, people from all walks of life as well as fruits, vegetables, chickens, etc. are transported daily in these public vans.