Sembène: The Making of African Cinema

AI: African Intelligence explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from disembodied machines towards a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of emergence for such improbable algorithms?

Malian filmmaker and New York University professor, Manthia Diawara critiques visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch.

In Senegal, Yene was traditionally a seaside town with many fishermen and farmers but has in recent years been troubled by coastal erosion and urbanisation. In conversation with the town’s community, Manthia Diawara explores how their lives contribute to the undermining of their shared environment.

Manthia Diawara's film follows the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant on a transatlantic journey as he discusses his philosophies of creollization, relation, and history.

In 2003, Manthia Diawara visited Guinea-Conakry to see what was left of the artists and intellectuals of the Guinean Cultural revolution, and how its citizens of Conakry were coping with globalization.

Mali born Manthia Diawara's documentary is a complement to Ângela Ferreira's artistic project on the Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé, which was shown at the Venice Biennale 2007.

Actor Danny Glover and director Manthia Diawara travel through West Africa from Goree to Dogon, creating conversations that link different sides and accounts of the African diaspora.

In An Opera of the World, Malian scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara reflects upon the refugee crisis and the relationship between Europe and Africa. The film revolves around a 2008 performance of Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, by Zé Manel Fortes with a libretto by Koulsy Lamko, in Bamako, around which Diawara builds a story about migration, interweaving interviews with documentary and archival footage. In the course of the film, one crosses into the world of opera from the tradition of sung wisdoms and sentiments, which has characterized West African culture for centuries. If opera is often understood as an über-European art form—the Gesamtkunstwerk invoked by Richard Wagner—Diawara chooses to meditate on its movement or migration as opposed to its expansion or totality. What happens when opera moves south, from Europe to Africa, just as so many people from that continent are moving north, in search of better lives?

Set in Bamako, capital of Mali, this unconventional documentary tells the story of the return of the director to his hometown, to see how his childhood friends are coping with globalization.