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Rising Senegalese Filmmaker Mamadou Dia on Grief, Trauma and ‘Indigenous Ways’ of Healing in Berlin Encounters Premiere ‘Demba’
After scooping two prizes in Locarno with his directorial debut, Dia returns with an affecting portrait of a middle-aged widower wrestling with grief.
A lonely widower wrestling with the loss of his wife finds himself in the thralls of a mental health crisis, setting the stage for a moving tale of grief and acceptance in Mamadou Dia ’s “Demba,” which premieres Feb. 17 in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival. As with his prize-winning debut, “Demba” takes place in the director’s native Matam, a small town on the banks of the Senegal River separating the West African country from neighboring Mauritania. Though now based in the U.S., where after getting his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he began to teach filmmaking at the University of Virginia, Dia insists that his inspiration comes first and foremost from his childhood home.
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