A frame within a frame
Mati Diop's documentary A Thousand Suns carefully examines the life of Magaye Niang, once a lead actor in the 1973 film Touki-Bouki, now a cattle-herder in Senegal. Diop draws many parallels between Magaye's life and the role in that film.
40 years after Touki-Bouki, Magaye's life seems to have been shaped and senses deeply informed by the film. His love life in particular obeys the same laws. In many ways the director present them as inseparable from each other.
It is in the homage of Djibril Diop Mambéty, the director of Touki-Bouki, that details are revealed about the film's plot. Young and beautiful, Magaye was considered at the time as talented enough to make it in Hollywood. The film within the documentary shows a couple who wants to leave Senegal: the boy fails to board the ship, while we see the girl waving goodbye as she leaves the mainland. This marks the end of them.
Magaye's first love was Ante, with whom he had plans to leave the country, stealing and lying if necessary to board a ship which would sail them in the direction of their dream. The dream was Europe or America. Magaye, as portrayed in the documentary, in that decisive moment of leaving appears to have an epiphany: his dreams are not dreams if they are attainable. In that moment of hesitation Magaye encourages Ante to board first, as he ponders what he could do in Europe—realising that it was absolutely nothing. He lets Ante go alone and never sees her again.
Touki-Bouki also marked the end of communism in Senegal. Today's youth wants democracy and economic development, to Magaye that translates as a pursuit of material things. There is a sense that one gets from the documentary that Magaye never wanted to change the course of his life because that would mean abandoning the reality which Touki-Bouki encapsulated. Reproducing the plot of the film through his life seems to be a way of eternalizing it.
