Demba

In an office in Matam, Senegal, an obviously troubled man asks his boss to be straight with him. What does it mean that there is a plan to be “rid of redundant staff”? If I am fired, I have a plan. This plan, he says, involves the tree back at his house. “Plus, I have some rope,” he adds. The man is Demba, the eponymous character from director Mamadou Dia. Demba is his follow-up project to the well-received Nafi’s Father from 2019.

As followers of African productions with some international success know, the troubled continent keenly displays its ugliest face at Western galas. So, like most films from Africa showing up at European festivals (this one is premiering at the Berlinale), Demba is not a comedy, although comic trimmings besprinkle the tale. Thus, in assessing films in the group, one has to look beyond theme into the particular, the peculiar, even the granular. With any luck the interchangeable narratives — around poverty, war, disease, strife, and politics — might meld into something original in any one of these films.

In this search for uniqueness, Demba’s most visible asset is its hero’s face, as presented wonderfully by Ben Mahmoud Mbow, who also appeared in Nafi’s Father. Beaten and mostly unamused, it recalls that of the hero of Eyimofe, another film occupied with African dysfunction that also got welcomed to Berlin. That film typified but then surpassed the thematic derivativeness of African pictures in Europe to present a story of unattainable yearning that passed the vibe check of idiosyncratic storytelling. Demba isn’t quite as excellent as that picture, but it does pack a power beyond its sad-sack theme.

Nafi’s Father screened at a plethora of festivals upon its release, and there’s no reason Demba won’t occupy the same spots that opened up to Dia at the time. As the world gets increasingly sensitised to mental health, Demba should get a chance to show at certain events interested in the subject. A smart curator can do interesting things with the subject.

Back to the story. Following the office scene described above, Demba’s vague suicidal intentions do not get executed. Instead, we see him return to the office he has worked in for years. Why doesn’t he get summarily fired? Part of the reason is revealed later: the Mayor is a man he has known since they were both schoolkids. Not that he is a saintly character. He’s a politician, after all, and the redundancy is coming as a result of a digitalisation drive that will knock Demba out of job in the archives department.

In other words, it is a perfect storm of inconveniences for Demba. He has problems with his son, his job is in danger and, perhaps above all, two years following her death, he is yet to get over his wife’s absence. We see their moments of grace together, Demba’s gate-wide gap between his teeth lighting up the screen. He’s unravelling but the man is in denial. But that’s only half the problem. The other half is how the community manages the situation. African communities still don’t quite have sophisticated care for the mentally impaired. Addressing this gap, Dia has pointed out that his native Fula language, which is spoken in this film, doesn’t have a word for depression. How can a person afflicted by it be helped, especially when, like Demba, he insists that he’s compos mentis?

Therefore, at the heart of Demba is a story about not just the man, but the country and maybe even the continent. In telling this story about this character, Dia is speaking about a place, a country.

This, clearly, is an interesting problem Dia has elected to present in cinematic terms. The issue is that his methods are a bit too desiccated to be engaging for a wide audience. At certain points, the story seems to holler for something dramatic—even melodramatic—to break the film’s humdrum naturalism and muted surrealism. But this is a very subtle picture that keeps the viewer at a certain remove, maybe in homage to its protagonist’s state of mind. The film is leavened by camera work that does some stunning shots of lo-fi beauty. And the screenplay features an admirable deployment of Chekhov’s gun—although even that might be too subtle for certain viewers to notice.