Senegal / 2020 / 8mins / Poetry film / Wolof

In times of social distance and the barrier gesture to protect one's neighbor, expression becomes an invaluable act to preserve our humanities. In Mbas mi, the director invites Goo Mamadou Ba to lend his voice to revive an essential text by Albert Camus. In the twilight of memory island, an incantatory voice rises. Carried by the surf, it changes according to a memory. From the alleys dotted with man-lanterns to the tops of sentinel baobabs, the words of "La Peste" resonate.

"The film requires everyone's gaze: in the mass of ruins and moral disaster, it is no longer suffering that is important. In the episode of the plague recreated to name something universal, it is a matter of the responsibility that falls to us. Us? Yes, Rieux is our common name. Shockingly of our time, he is the shared subject who whispers to us the imperative of not bowing to fate."

- Excerpt from the review by the Philosopher and writer, El Hadj Hamidou Kasse

Joseph Gaï Ramaka

Joseph Gaï Ramaka was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Senegal. After completing studies in visual anthropology at the Paris School of Social Sciences and film studies at the IDHEC, Ramaka created the French production and distribution company, Les Ateliers de l’Arche, in 1990. The Senegalese branch of this company opened the Bell’Arte space in Senegal in 1999, a Dolby stereo-equipped screening facility. This in turn jump-started the creative work of the Arche Studios, West and Central Africa’s first 15,000 square meter sound stage with computerized lighting. Some of Ramaka's films include And What If Latif Was Right winner of Best Documentary Film Award at the Vues d'Afrique Festival - Montreal 2006, Karmen Geï (2000, Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals), Ainsi soit-il (1997, Short Film Prize at Vues d’Afrique), Nitt...N’doxx / Les Faiseurs de Pluie (1988), and Baaw-Naan / Rites de Pluie (1985). He established the New Orleans Afrikan Film Festival in 2007 and in 2013, he created Gorée Island Cinema, a space for encounters and cinematographic creations, which has presented the Gorée Cinema Festival since 2015.

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