We conclude our tribute to cinemas and moviegoing with a recent Senegalese short about two kids who band together to purchase movie tickets.

Drawing upon his own first memories of watching a film on the big screen, award-winning filmmaker Mamadou Dia spins a simple story of two movie-obsessed kids into a warm look at friendship and community. Shot in a small village in Northern Senegal, Dia’s film immerses itself in the local customs of its setting by showing how friends Baba and Sembene fulfill neighborly tasks to raise money and attend their town cinema’s last showing.

Dia, who has expressed a commitment to making films about normal people in Africa as opposed to attention-grabbing stories about hard-hit communities, approaches Samedi Cinema with a soft touch. His leisurely depiction of town-life pays special attention to the different outfits and speech patterns of its population, offering a snapshot portrait of a diverse community whose multifarious ways-of-life betray the smallness of their hamlet.

“Samedi Cinema is basically two friends in Northern Senegal who write letters to raise money to go watch a movie and that movie happens to be Malcom X. Malcolm X is the first movie I saw on a big screen and when I say big screen, it was literally a white sheet and a projector.” MAMADOU DIA

 

There’s a heartfeltness to the fact that Dia chooses the first film he ever saw on the big screen as the last movie the townsfolk of Samedi Cinema will watch together. Dia has said that watching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X made him aware that there was “someone thinking” behind the film; in turn, inspiring him to think about how he’d make films. Years later, he’d recall how he met Spike Lee while doing his MFA at New York University. And while Lee was not able to help him secure clips from the film to include in Samedi Cinema, he told him he could use the sound and gave him one of his personal Malcolm X posters for the film.

Mamadou Dia was born in Matam, Senegal, in 1984. He worked as a journalist across Africa and Europe before becoming a filmmaker. His feature film debut Baanum Nafi won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019. His more recent follow-up Demba premiered at the Berlinale last year. In 2023, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has expressed a commitment to continue directing films about “everyday people.”

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Jason Evans of This Long Century for recommending this film, as well as Sheldon Chau and Mamadou Dia for making this screening possible.