Doudou Diop was a young filmmaker from Saint-Louis (Senegal), who made shorts tackling issues of environmental justice. In his first film, Dépotoir (2022), two mothers struggle to make a living by doing laundry or recycling plastic waste littering the beach. Using cheap digital technology and a hand-held camera, Diop embraces an aesthetics of low definition while delving into garbage, a prolific cinematic and postcolonial motif and a site of resistance against high culture. In 2023, Diop decided to get into the pirogue as yet another migrant to make a film on his friend Tapha’s third crossing attempt. Yet, like countless others, Doudou Diop died in the ocean at the deadly gates of Europe.

The symbolic construction of migration as crisis, along images of boat cramped with faceless bodies, have come to normalise what has become the deadliest border in the world. Yet, Doudou Diop’s story resists trivialization. From an article in El Pais to its copies in the Senegalese press, from an aborted Spanish minidocumentary to a Senegalese film d’auteur, from an Instagram screenshot to an academic journal: Doudou’s story has taken many routes to pollinate our minds. A film that was never made and a story full of holes have made its way into the cracks of hegemonical discourses of migratory dissuasion.

But who are we to tell his story? As Diop’s missing film triggers multiple cycles of appropriation (in Senegal and Europe), it also interrogates our fraught positions. If Doudou’s story connects us, it connects us through different modes of capture. For there is a cannibalistic violence in telling and watching Doudou’s story on the northern side of the Mediterranean, from the comforts of our barricaded cities. The discomfort of telling Doudou’s story is inescapable – and let us try not to avoid it. As Olivier Marboeuf (2022) suggests, to decolonize is not merely to ask where does one think from, but also where does one think towards. Doudou’s work does not provide us merely with a perspective to swallow up, but also a gesture to inherit. Today, as official bodies fail and our administrations kill, how may we inherit Doudou’s made and unmade films?

We will host a public screening of Doudou Diop’s Dépotoir alongside Mamadou Khouma Gueye’s Xaar Yalla (2021). Following the films, a roundtable discussion will take place between Mamadou Khouma Gueye, filmmaker and co-founder of the festival Tééméri Bop Koñ in Dakar (“A Thousand and One Street Corners”), an initiative that brings cinema to take part in local struggles, with Véronique Clette-Gakuba, sociology researcher at Metices (ULB) and member of the collective Présences Noires.

Introduce by Pierre Coheur (ULB vice-rector of sustainable development)

Free entrance but registration encouraged: here