Mati Diop On Launching Senegalese Production House Fanta Sy With Fabacary Assymby Coly And Their Plans To Produce “Daring” African Projects
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: After clinching the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019 with her debut fiction feature Atlantics, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop had one burning desire. “My dream was to set up a film school in Dakar,” she tells Deadline.
Diop made history that year in Cannes as the first Black woman to compete in the festival’s official competition. She clocked a similar milestone in February when she became the first Black filmmaker to win Berlin’s Golden Bear with the inventive documentary Dahomey.
Borrowing its name from the ancient West African kingdom of Dahomey, located in the south of today’s Republic of Benin, the doc opens in November 2021 as twenty-six royal treasures from the former Kingdom are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin.
Along with thousands of others, the artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. Dahomey is Diop’s second feature project and the first from Fanta Sy, the Dakar-based production house she quietly launched earlier this year with her creative partner Fabacary Assymby Coly, a Senegalese industry veteran.
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