In "Atlantiques", time’s arrow breaks, wrinkling through dream and fantasy. As young men discuss journeying to Europe by pirogue, they speak of the voyage in the past tense, yet are located still in Africa. Does the crossing lie ahead or behind, in reality or fantasy? The linear temporality of modernity, of progress, is undone. This fireside conversation is accompanied by the sounds of an ocean that remains out of frame in all but one shot. Beginning and ending with dreams tied to the sea, this penumbral, palindromic film pleats its centre, when a death is reported but not seen. "Atlantiques" departs from the direct representation of suffering to ask whether our ethical consciousness might be activated instead by fiction and blockage, by the powers of the false. Turning away from spectacle, Diops finds in the obliquity of storytelling a subtle means of confronting an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
