Berlin Hidden Gem: ‘Demba’ Is A Meditation on Grief and Redemption in Northern Senegal

In Senegal, depression is considered so taboo there’s no word for it. For his second feature film, after 2019 Nafi’s Father, Senegalese director Mamadou Dia returns to his hometown in West Africa to explore a deeply personal subject that, he says, is not discussed enough.

The film tells the story of a middle-aged retiree named Demba, played by Ben Mahmoud Mbow, who is adjusting to life after 30 years of service in the city hall in a small town in northern Senegal. Facing an uncertain future, Demba is haunted by the death of his wife two years earlier — and the role he played in it. Wrestling with despair during a long, hot summer, Demba discovers a path toward redemption by forming a connection with his community — friends in his small village encourage him to see a therapist — and reconnecting with his estranged son.

For Dia, the film is an attempt to process his despair over the loss of his mother when he was a teenager. Marked deeply by the loss, the director says it continues to influence both his worldview and his work as a filmmaker.

“I’m not interested in heroes in movies,” he says. “I’m not interested in those people who were born poor and become millionaires — the success stories. What I’m interested in is day-to-day life.”

In the character of Demba, Dia sees parallels with his own experience with grief, and how crippling it can be if not confronted. “This is a human being who’s going through grief and wants to be normal again,” he says. “My denial from my mother’s death expanded for years. And that’s the first phase in mourning. I didn’t cry at all. And mourning, it’s something so common in all the societies, in all the world. [But] nobody talks about it.”

This is especially true, the director says, in Senegal, where denial of depression is a cultural norm. In the film, Demba fears that he will become like his friend Pekane, a man driven so mad by despair that his family has him physically restrained with chains for his own safety and the safety of others. It’s a practice, Dia says, that is surprisingly common. “It’s called shackling,” he says. “It happens in countries that you would not even imagine. There are people locked in houses. You might be walking by the house, wherever you are, and have no idea they are there.”

But despite Demba’s themes of despair and disconnect, Dia injects the movie with hope, ending it on a poignant note with the depiction of a Tajabone, a West African celebration in which people cross-dress and try to outsmart death by confusing it. Demba wears a wig and women’s clothing, cognizant that something in him needs to die to overcome his pain. 

Premiering in the Berlinale’s Encounters section and repped at the European Film Market by France’s The Party Film Sales, Dia says he is looking forward to showing the film in his hometown of Khombole, especially because the cast is made up entirely of people from its community. “The idea [was] not to have a script and impose that on them, because they’re not professional actors,” he says, adding that Mbow also struggled with the death of his mother. “The filming of Demba has been a healing journey for both men, who have learned that the last step of grief is making meaning.”