SOULS OF FOUTA

In August 2006, when Alpha Diallo was fourteen, he traveled to Senegal, his country of origin, for the first time. During this trip, he met his entire fulani family and spent a month in his parent's native village, in the north of the country, in a region known as the Fouta. There, Alpha learned of the death of his cousin's best friend from a drug overdose. He was sixteen years old. Members of his family refused to bury him in the village cemetery, claiming that his soul was "impure". Alpha Diallo remember, in the midst of adolescence, this tragedy deeply shook him. He had never before been confronted with the death of a boy from his own generation. This story, where his family out of shame, did not bury him alongside their own, tore Alpha apart. Nearly ten years later, in 2015, he returned to Senegal for the second time. He was able to see my parent's village no longer through the eyes of an adolescent, but as a young adult facing the world. Once again with his cousin, he told him how the death of his best friend had changed him and altered his way of seeing the world. He spoke to Alpha at length about mercy and love. At the time, Alpha Diallo did not feel legitimate enough to tell and carry this story, as it deals with a subject that is both taboo and deeply intimate. But through his artistic journey and the resonance of this universal tragedy, he felt compelled to draw the contours of this story. He began writing the short film in 2020, with sorrow, and suffering as its guiding thread. It was a long process of stripping the writing down to its core, during which he divided the story into three chapters : incomprehension, doubt, and liberation.