Project Description
Mamadou Dia
FSC Associated Fellow 2025-26, Black Film Project-FSC Fellow 2026-27
Mamadou Dia is a Senegalese filmmaker from Matam, along the Senegal River. His films include Samedi Cinema, Baamum Nafi, Demba, and Atcha Atcha, and have screened at festivals including Venice, Toronto, Berlin, and Locarno. His work explores memory, belief, community, and the space between what is visible and what is felt. He is currently a Black Film Project Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, where he is developing Augustus. He has also taught fiction filmmaking at Harvard and the University of Virginia.
FSC Works
Atcha Actha
Mamadou Dia
Atcha Actha (formerly titled Legacy / Soleil Lune Étoiles, follows Germaine Acogny, often called the “mother of contemporary African dance,” and her school, the École des Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. Through her story and that of her students, the film explores questions of heritage, memory, and transmission — how dance carries both history and the possibility of renewal across generations.
Augustus
Mamadou Dia
Augustus is a feature film project inspired by the life of Augustus Washington, a nineteenth-century African American photographer who left the United States for Liberia and later worked in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Moving between different perspectives on a rapidly changing city, the film explores competing ideas of freedom, progress, power, and belonging. Working from a fragmentary archive, the project asks what fiction can responsibly imagine when history leaves important gaps.