Mille soleils

Portrait of Magaye Niang, who played the lead in the African classic Touki Bouki by Djibil Diop Mambéty in 1973. In A Thousand Suns, Niang attends a special screening of this film about a couple who want nothing more than to emigrate from Senegal to France. Ultimately, the man stays behind in his homeland, just as Niang did. Forty years later, he is still a livestock farmer and we see him walk the streets of Dakar, grumpy and drunk. Some boys at the Touki Bouki screening don’t believe him when he says he was the lead.
A Thousand Suns was made by Mati Diop, filmmaker Djibil Diop Mambéty’s niece. Just like Touki Bouki, Diop’s film mixes fact and fiction creating a suitable homage to the classic her uncle directed, but above all a sensitive portrait of a man who, in his own words, ‘lost himself’.