WORKSHOP 4

"If Africans do not tell their own stories, Africa will soon disappear.”

– Ousmane Sembène

DAKAR, SENEGAL, December 2025 — A city built on a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, where light falls differently than anywhere else on the continent. Dakar has always known how to tell its own story. It is the birthplace of postcolonial African cinema — home to Ousmane Sembène, who revolutionized narrative cinema in the 1960s, and to Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose work remade what the moving image could hold. That inheritance lives in the city still — in its streets, its storytellers, and a thriving creative community that continues to push at the edges of the form.

For AFMAC's fourth workshop, following stops in Lagos, Tangier, and Nairobi, Dakar was a natural gathering place. A city whose artists have long worked across borders and disciplines while remaining rooted in the specificity of place, it offered both the creative friction and the warmth that the Collective's work embraces.

AFMAC's home base for the Dakar workshops was RAW Material Company — the contemporary art center and critical resource founded by curator Koyo Kouoh in 2008. A space for art, theory, and civic imagination, RAW has long occupied a singular place in African cultural life, nurturing artists and ideas that have traveled far beyond Senegal's borders. Kouoh, who went on to lead Zeitz MOCCA in Cape Town before her passing in 2024, remains one of the most visionary curatorial figures the continent has produced. Her presence was felt throughout the week.

For the Workshop, AFMAC had the pleasure of partnering with Fanta Sy, the Dakar-based production house founded by filmmaker and lead artist Mati Diop, alongside Fabacary Assymby Coly.

"The fact that we are creating this first chapter of an adventure, of Fanta Sy, within the walls of RAW that Koyo Kouoh created, has a particularly strong resonance for us…and I think this place reflects her, it’s more than just a location. It’s really a very strong political gesture. And beginning this adventure here, even if it’s bittersweet because Koyo is no longer with us… she’s everywhere."

— Mati Diop

Diop, whose 2019 film Atlantiques made her the first Black woman to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is deeply attuned to place, memory, and the lives that images can hold. In Dakar, working within the walls of a space that has long championed exactly this kind of work, the workshop took on an added resonance.

The focus of the week was production, both the practical and conceptual work of transforming a screenplay into a film. Over the course of six sessions with six participants, Diop and Coly led an intensive dialogue, moving between the craft of storytelling and the mechanics of bringing a vision to life on screen.

"I spoke about a dream of founding a film school, and to me, this is the film school. It’s being supported to make films and having tools for reflection and manufacturing at your disposal. To me, it's the best way to learn how to make films."

— Mati Diop

"Indeed, the film school has begun. Even in this inspiring setting of RAW Material, this desire for transmission is there."

— Fabacary Assymby Coly

The evenings extended the conversation into the public. A screening of Atlantiques at RAW opened the week to a wider audience, inviting Dakar’s creative community into the workshop environment. On the final day, the Collective traveled to Ngor Island for a closing screening of Djibril Diop Mambéty's beloved 1999 film The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun. To watch the work of one of Senegal's most visionary filmmakers in the place that shaped him, surrounded by the ocean and a community of artists committed to carrying that legacy forward, was to understand what AFMAC is, at its core, about.

“One must have a mad belief that everything is possible… Because I know that cinema must be reinvented, reinvented each time, and whoever ventures into cinema also has a share in its reinvention.”

– Djibril Diop Mambéty