Amath Niane

Guinaw Rail, a forgotten neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar, is emptying out. Bulldozers are demolishing houses along the route of the ‘Train Express Regional’, the symbol of President Macky Sall's “Emerging Senegal”.

Awa, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, is happily living her teenage years alongside her twin brother Adama who dreams of Europe. When their grandmother dies, her aunt Fatou and her uncle Atoumane promise to marry in order to preserve the family union. But Fatou does not love Atoumane and the latter, tired of waiting to consummate his marriage, commits an act from which there is no going back.

When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.