Le Voyage de Talia (2022) is a bilingual, 80 minute Belgian/Senegalese film in Wolof and French by director Christophe Rolin. The film was nominated for two awards at the African Movie Academy Awards. It follows nineteen-year-old Talia, an Afro-Belgian, on her first trip to her ancestral homeland of Senegal. There, she deals with the reality of Dakar, the Capital of Senegal, being so divorced from her own fantasies and cultural memories of her homeland.
Talia arrives in Senegal and stays with her cousin at her parents’ large, villa-like house. She spends time at bars and clubs in Dakar with her cousin and her friends who joke about her “European-ness” and inability to speak Wolof, a Niger-Congo language. It becomes clear that they are not interested in what Talia is here to find: the ill-defined, and sometimes mystical notion of her “African-ness.”
Setting off on her own, she visits tourist sites like the Island of Gorée (the largest slave-trading center on the African coast 15th-19th centuries) and the African Renaissance Monument but remains unfulfilled. After this, she meets and befriends Malika, a young woman who lives in the neighboring house and works as a bird seller in the city. With Malika, she witnesses Dakar’s regular, working-class areas that often don’t align with her preconceived notions. Eventually, Talia leaves Dakar to travel inland in search of her grandmother, only seen in photographs.
One of the film’s most interesting themes is Talia’s alienation from her homeland. Her Belgian identity gives her more common ground with white Europeans than the people she interacts with in Senegal. On her trip, she acts like any regular European: she reads a One Piece manga on the bus, visits popular tourist destinations, becomes shocked when a street mob goes after a thief who stole her phone, etc. The film’s defining conflict is articulated in the throwaway remark by one of her cousin’s friends that “she is not a real African.” This is Talia’s dilemma: Is she African or European? Watching this film makes the viewers ask themselves what being a “real African” even means.
This film – unlike most American films, and even many independent art films – has very little dialogue in it. Talia is silent for most of the runtime, even in conversations where she is the subject. Not only does this add weight to her words, but it also separates the viewer from the main character, mirroring the separation between Talia, the experiencer, and “Senegal,” the passive object being experienced. The filmmaker explores Talia’s search for her African identity (embodied in her physical search for her grandmother) by incorporating visually and aurally unique dream sequences throughout. He also uses Dakar to show the class divide between those in the villas and those in the shanty towns, and those who wear the latest fashions or go clubbing and those who wear rags.
Le Voyage de Talia remains a beautifully shot film whose themes are incredibly relevant to the contemporary experiences of many of African descent around the world.
