A celebrated artist, writer and scholar, Manthia Diawara crafts personal essay films that reckon with the many changing faces of the African continent and its diaspora. On the occasion of the global streaming premiere of his latest film, A Letter from Yene (2022) exclusively on MUBI, we bring you three probing, conversational documentaries from this peripatetic artist.

Born in Mali’s capital of Bamako in 1953, Manthia Diawara grew up in Conakry, Guinea, where his family lived until they were expelled during Sékou Touré’s rule in 1964. A roving intellectual, Diawara studied in France before moving to the United States. In the essay films in this focus, Diawara actively positions himself as a diasporic subject whose personal experiences, travels, and interactions inform the direction of his films. Somewhere between a video diary and a letter, A Letter from Yene ruminates on our impact on the environment, focusing on the small Senegalese fishing village of Yene that Diawara holidays in regularly. In Conakry Kas (2004), Diawara journeys to Guinea’s capital to explore what remains of the cultural revolution, from the Ballets Africains and the Bembeya Jazz National to intellectuals like D.T. Niane and Telivel Diallo. Like so many of his films, Diawara enlists multiple voices and perspectives from the communities in question, which here range from the local youth of Conakry to celebrity activists and performers like Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte. In Maison Tropicale (2008) Diawara mounts a personal investigation of the complex interrelationship between modernism, colonialism, and architecture by focusing on an unusual case study. In all three films, Diawara remains our firm and stable guide through the histories of African intellectual traditions and the tangled webs of colonialism: always listening, asking questions, and looking to the future, to see what it holds.

Jeff Gay