talias journey

Talia's Journey

Directed by Christophe Rolin
Belgium | 2022 | Narrative
79 minutes

Talia is a 19-year old Belgian girl with Senegalese roots, living in Brussels with her boyfriend where everything is in its place "like a well-arranged painting." But something is missing. Talia throws on her backpack and heads for Dakar to visit family and hopefully meet her grandmother. The Dakar she discovers is a whole other city than the one she’d imagined, and perhaps a whole other city than the one the audience imagines: festive and shimmering on the one hand, fierce yet bright on the other. Talia is confronted with another universe, another possible way of being. What if her parents had stayed here? Would she have been like her wealthy cousin Binta or the working class Malika that she befriends? Projecting herself into other possible selves helps her to better understand where she comes from, who she is and, we suspect, where she wants to go.