Ocean of Longing

French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s Cannes sensation Atlantics is a migrant-ghost story for our time.

- Maya Binyam

Between senegal and the Canary Islands stretch almost 1,000 miles of ocean. Cruise ships cut through the waves like knives. They make the journey in 11 days, and their passengers, who pay upward of $4,000 for a ticket, disembark unscathed. But luxury tourism almost always involves a contortion of optics. Since the mid-1990s, thousands of people along Senegal’s coast, most of them young and poor, have boarded smaller boats, typically used for fishing, in hopes of reaching Europe. The Canary Islands—which sit about halfway between Senegal and Europe and are an archipelago belonging to Spain, making them part of the EU—are often their first stop. Along the way, the waves can appear as big as mountains, and the boats, made from wood and rusted nails, act as fragile as flesh. An unknown but staggering number of migrants have drowned, and their bodies populate the ocean as if it were a mass grave.

In the beginning scenes of Atlantics, the much-lauded debut feature film from French-Senegalese director Mati Diop and the winner of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix, a group of young men depart from the suburbs of Dakar in search of work in Spain. Their exit is swift and carried out in secret—their mothers, sisters, and lovers discover the loss only after they’ve gathered at a local nightclub and pass the news around like a handkerchief. The club might as well be a funeral home; it’s as if the boys were dead already. In life, they were construction workers, and their disappearance forces the architecture of the city to take on new, illusory shapes. A half-built skyscraper, initially the glimmering totem of economic promise, becomes a monument of suffering, and the shoreline, once a locus of fascination, starts to feel like a chokehold.