Tansi Makele is a Franco-Congolese filmmaker who grew up in the Paris suburbs and started making short documentaries at 19. His early work was mostly about dance and movement. Since then he has worked across fashion films, fiction, and experimental video. He cites Khalil Joseph, Terrence Malick, and Spike Lee as reference points, along with the music videos that came out of Black American R&B in the 1990s.
Novo Atlantico was shot in Dakar, looking out toward Gorée Island. Gorée was a holding point in the transatlantic slave trade, and Makele treats it as such — not as scenery. The film connects Dakar to Brazil through two ideas: marronnage, the act of escaping enslavement to form free communities, and quilombo, the Brazilian word for the villages those communities built. The voice-over is taken from Castro Alves’s O Navio Negreiro, his poem about the Middle Passage.
The film is short and pointed. Makele is asking how the Afro-diaspora carries its history forward, and what part of it gets remade in the process. The answer he offers, with Dakar on one side of the ocean and Brazil on the other, is that resistance and freedom are the through-line.
— Ekow Barnes