A lonely widower wrestling with the loss of his wife finds himself in the thralls of a mental health crisis, setting the stage for a moving tale of grief and acceptance in Mamadou Dia’s “Demba,” which premieres Feb. 17 in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival.
“Demba” follows its titular protagonist, an archivist in a provincial Senegalese town being nudged toward an early retirement after nearly 30 years in the civil service. A stubborn, irascible widower nicknamed “grumpy” by the locals, he struggles to accept the loss of his wife as the two-year anniversary of her death approaches.
Estranged from his son, staring down his professional obsolescence as part of a digitization push by the local government, his mental health begins to deteriorate. But that also opens the door for him to mend his broken relationships, and perhaps even find a shot at salvation.
The film marks the auspicious follow-up to Dia’s arresting first feature, “Baamum Nafi” (“Nafi’s Father”), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019, where it scooped the award for best first feature, as well as the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present section.
As with his prize-winning debut, “Demba” takes place in the director’s native Matam, a small town on the banks of the Senegal River separating the West African country from neighboring Mauritania. Though now based in the U.S., where after getting his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he began to teach filmmaking at the University of Virginia, Dia insists that his inspiration comes first and foremost from his childhood home. “That’s the place I know. That’s the place I feel safe,” he tells PvNew. “Senegal is always my heart.”
“Demba” is a deeply personal film inspired by the death of the director’s mother when he was a boy, a trauma he found himself revisiting during the coronavirus pandemic. It was only with the help of a therapist that he came to realize the younger version of himself was clinically depressed.
“I had no idea. Nobody put a word to that [in Senegal],” says Dia, noting that there’s no word for “depression” in his mother tongue, Fula. Now 41, the director started to think again about that tumultuous period, focusing on the unseen and unspoken ways that he learned to process his grief.
“Death is not a taboo [in our culture]. We talk about it, we recognize it and we face it,” he says. “The question became, how do I heal, and how do people heal in the society, if you have to go through depression as it is commonly understood today?”
Demba, played by Ben Mahmoud Mbow who made his acting debut in “Nafi’s Father,” does not willingly take the first step in that healing journey. Still dreaming of his departed wife, Awa (Awa Djiga Kane), he shuns therapy and pushes away the loved ones urging him to let go, including his son, played by newcomer Mamadou Sylla. What emerges is a portrait of a community rallying around a man who seems determined to keep it at arm’s length, highlighting what Dia describes as “the indigenous ways of mental healing.”
“When we talk about mental health, we mostly talk about the Western lens of treating mental health,” he says. “And we forget there are communities in the world that have thousands and thousands of years in trying to heal their mental health. And that’s also my experience with grieving, how the community came to me and my siblings when we lost our mother.” He adds: “The community is always going to stick with you.”
