Mamadou Khouma Gueye’s first feature stands as a gesture of memory. Travelling around Thiaroye, where he spent his childhood, at a time when Senegal’s regional express train network is fracturing, reshaping and almost obliterating the area, the film captures the present as an archive in the making: it films places before they disappear, the texture of an unpredictable daily life doomed to relegation. Yet this wounded and troubled topography also becomes an inner map. Through his mother’s presence, Gueye interlinks the personal and the collective, the persistence of ties to the metamorphosis of spaces. Attachment is not simply a film about loss, but also about what remains of belonging, of our lives, when the earth itself gives way. The title’s attachment thus becomes polysemic, denoting the route of the train connecting Dakar to Diamniadio, the ties of French companies to Senegal under the large-scale project backed by Macky Sall, and the path connecting a son to his mother and to their memories.
Jérôme Baron
First feature film · French premiere
