“They’re not monsters. They’re just tired.” – Ada, Atlantics (2019)
“I placed her in the sea so that the sea. . . .” – Laurence, Saint Omer (2022)
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In the span of a few years, two filmmakers named Diop – Mati and Alice – have unveiled compelling stories that, though distinct, reverberate with a shared, profound grief. When I watched Saint Omer, the slow-burn courtroom drama by Alice Diop, I couldn’t help but catch my mind wandering to Atlantics, the Senegalese social drama by Mati Diop. There was the obvious parallel of the piercing social critique of the situation of the Senegalese people — whether struggling at home as outliers to a predatory capitalism or immigrants caught in the crosshairs of the French justice system. Yet it was the shared code of myth and ghosts that caught my thoughts in stirring loops.
Myths and ghosts embody – or perhaps wear the shrouds of – the muted, the exiled, the unutterable. Where language, at the discretion of authority, obfuscates and delimits the oppressed, ghostliness endures as an interruption of the status quo. What must not be seen or heard – what is relegated to absence – it draws its resistance from traces, haunts, and discomforting nudges of affect. Postcolonial cinemas of Global South filmmakers – particularly gendered directors – like Alice and Mati suffuse their politics with the affective aesthetics of estrangement, collective loneliness, and exility.
Where Mati leaned into the folkloric ghostliness of the oppressed, Alice summoned Medea to plead for the indicted. Two distinct voices emerge and fade into inevitable silence. Mati’s ghosts – Soulemanne and his comrades – possess the women left behind. The women who stay behind, a trope as old as fiction itself – from those in origin myths to those of the Second World War – become oddly uninterred bodies moving through negative spaces once inhabited by men. It is little surprise, then, that the ghosts of the sunken men swiftly occupy these designated vessels. The commentary at play is double-edged, offering little reprieve: as these possessed women walk out of their homes in droves and occupy the living room of the builder, they channel a rage that is at once their own and yet borrowed. These women are ghosts in life and in death; the agency of the postcolonial woman remains elusive even after patriarchal absence.
Atlantics
While Mati’s possessed women find their agency elusive, Alice’s trope of the “vile mother,” Laurence, finds herself at trial for claiming her agency in ways that are unpardonable. Laurence stands as a shrouded figure in court – almost like a terra-cotta figurine – watching stoically as the social dramaturges around her debate her fate. Her plight is a complex ethical and moral dilemma: a mother who has committed infanticide, an immigrant who has flouted French laws, a seemingly remorseless woman who has claimed agency through a death – a mother who has distressed motherhood itself. A certain version of justice will be served, but the haunting implications of the issue will resist resolution.
Saint Omer
The ghosts and the myth are locally rooted yet cross-culturally resonant — haunting stories beyond borders, in languages grief alone can carry. While a few years apart, the two films capture the essence of storytelling from the Global South — their stories are of hauntings, of unresolved traumas and unsayable grief. Some grievances have persisted for so long, only the fantastical remains to express the plight of time itself.
There is no narrative to resolve; these are experiences of morally ubiquitous conflicts. Quite like the sea where Laurence drowned her child, or Soulemanne and his companions unwillingly settled in their watery graves, the attempt to regularise canonical trends finds resistance in the strong waves of the unsayable. Nobody can hear you scream out at sea; no canon can easily fit the grief of the postcolonial mourner. For there are no scriptures of Enlightenment that may account for its colonial shadows or the monsters it categorises. These films occupy spaces where time withholds easy answers.
Saint Omer
These prodding, uncertain narratives are the rudders of the aesthetic disjunctions of the Global South. Saint Omer is a deeply uncomfortable viewing experience. While moral conflict drives it, the film’s severe aesthetics anchors its unease. We slowly wade through scenarios that barely shift, wry dialogues that mimic life at its most clinical, an unmoving accused in her defiance, a high-stakes courtroom drama drained of spectacle and compliant empathy. True to arthouse cinema’s adherence to testing, not entertaining, the almost two-hour film dilates into a viscous chasm of relentless, mundane stillness.
Stillness occupies the streets of Atlantics as well, though it performs motion through the mechanics of genre and mystery. Ghostliness piques curiosity; mystery breeds interest. The restraint of arthouse filmmaking remains, but the simplicity of a linear plot promises a denouement long enough to engage expectation. Narrative feels central yet proves incidental: the ghosts and the women walk through the night, clinging to one another as they inhabit the spaces of the living. Death and stagnation prevail, but the promise of a space beyond time yields only an ever-receding horizon of resolution. Soulemanne will not resurrect, Ada will not reunite with her lover, the builder will not receive some palatable punishment – and yet we watch these lives, or afterlives, slip through time. Time here dilates too, but unlike the suspended gravel of Saint Omer, we and the characters lie in amber – dreaming.
Time emerges as a fraught political currency across cinemas of the Global South. In histories contending with colonial erasures, forgotten origins, and imposed linearity, every cinematic gesture is an act of reclamation. This begets the question: How does one reclaim time itself? The experience of time in Mati and Alice’s elegies of grief is perhaps a sign of such reclamation. We are consuming narratives and feeling affects that exist within the disjunctions of the sayable. For the unsayable does not merely inhabit time, it lingers in it. Laurence’s trial and Medea’s myth hold hands across continental continuums, while Ada’s grief flows through the veins of liminal cross-cultural connectivity. If time and history are wrapped for sense, the aesthetics of absence unweave them – laying bare the traces of that which has been exiled, whether by death, economics, or justice.
These ghosts and myths are amorphous effigies of absence. The ghosts are haunted in love marred by oppression, the myth rises from the perilous loves we are taught to expect. Grief is the materia that embalms these effigies in time. As time flows and ebbs, grief prolongs the moment between each wave. The two Diops catalyse the traces of histories – collective and personal, capitalistic and natural, colonial and native – within their films; a cinematic aesthetic emerges that is at once visible and withheld. The worlds Laurence and Ada inhabit are under the occupation of systemic erasure. As they endure their destinies, the two Diops speak to each other in silence — across tropes that echo the limbo their characters, and the lives of the Global South, continue to inhabit.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
