Saint Louis Blues
Directed by Dyana Gaye
Drama | 2009 | 48 mins.
France, Senegal | Language: French/Wolof with English subtitles Dakar,

About the film: Dakar, Senegal. The end of the summer. Along the journey from Dakar to Saint Louis, the passengers of a taxi meet each other’s destiny and tell their lives through songs.
The public transportation imposes an immediate intimacy to the users, who at first only share a common direction. They are physically close to one another without the obligation of making contact. It is the possibility of these encounters that I wished to explore in this film, through characters who become storytellers of the present and of their own lives.
I chose to develop these encounters through songs, willing to mix certain conventions of the Musical with the great African oral tradition. The Musical is the genre that allows two seemingly opposite worlds to cohabit : the harsh reality of Senegal and the enchanted world of musical.

Screening Times @ Victory Fire House
5:15PM Wednesday, June 15
5:15PM Thursday, June 16

About the Director: Dyana Gaye was born in Paris in 1975. She majored in Film Studies at Paris 8 – St Denis University in 1998. In 1999, she won the Louis Lumière-Villa Médicis grant for her script A woman for Souleymane which she directed the following year. In 2004, she was the finalist of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative and was nominated for the second time in 2007. In 2005, she directed a musical one shot sequence film, Remembering Paris, for the project Paris, la métisse. In 2006, her film Deweneti (Ousmane) received numerous distinctions all over the world and was nominated at the César 2008 (french Academy Awards) for Best Short Film. In 2009, she directed Un Transport en Commun (Saint Louis Blues), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, Filmmakers of the Present.