Doudou Joop: The pirogue of cinema

Abstract

In July 2023, Doudou Diop died in the ocean while attempting to reach Europe. The over-repetition of these words, along with images of boats cramped with faceless bodies, have come to normalise what has become the deadliest border in the world. Yet, Diop’s story re-sists trivialisation. Doudou was a young filmmaker from Saint-Louis (Senegal) who made shorts tackling issues of environmental justice. His dedication to cinema and his community led him to make a film on his friend Tapha’s third crossing attempt. A journalist wrote a fea-ture article on Doudou, swiftly followed by national and internation-al newspapers. From an article in El Pais to its copies in the Senega-lese press, from an aborted Spanish minidocumentary to a Senega-lese film d’auteur, from an Instagram screenshot to an academic journal – Doudou’s story has taken many routes to pollinate our minds. This article asks: how did Doudou’s films mobilise our voices and work, in the film industry and beyond? Drawing from insights by Marshall McLuhan, Hito Steyerl, Antonio Somaini, and Francesco Casetti, who interrogate how low-resolution images are produced, appropriated, and circulate, we trace the journeys of Doudou’s imag-es in Africa and Europe from the lens of the digital economy of im-ages. We analyse Diop’s previous works Dépotoir (2022) and Voisin des Eaux Usées (2023). Both delve into garbage, a prolific cinematic and postcolonial motif and a site of resistance against high culture: the poor image made flesh. Finally, this article asks: how low must media go to move us? If it is impossible to capture mass death at the Schengen borders, it is this very impossibility that Doudou’s unmade film demands us to face. His unfinished business is a social force, connecting us to a multitude of other stories that reinvent the mean-ing of circulation.