Abstract

Jane Bryce interviews Senegalese filmmaker, Moussa Sene Absa, at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, where she works and he is a visiting lecturer. She asks what drew Moussa back to Barbados, which he visited for the first time as a guest of the Festival of African and Caribbean Film, which she codirected. The interview reveals Moussa’s sense of mission, his desire to awaken in his Barbadian students a capacity for wonder at their own world. He deplores a concept of filmmaking which exclusively references Hollywood, emphasizing the dynamism of popular culture. He points to its potential for a local film aesthetic, encompassing both the material—visual and aural—and the intangible—modes of self-perception, self-construction, and self-evaluation. Bryce views and comments on a new documentary, in which Moussa explores how a boatload of Senegalese economic refugees ended up off the coast of Barbados.

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