Visions du Réel 2025: The Attachment (Liti Liti) (dir. Mamadou Khouma Gueye) | Review
With emotion, Mamadou Khouma Gueye paints a portrait of his mother, a symbol of courage and resilience, and of the community of Guinaw Rails — a final tribute before the destruction of a place that means so much to them.
The Dakar Regional Express Train project (hereafter “RET”), in Senegal, aimed to ease traffic congestion between the capital and the rest of the country, and to accelerate the region’s economic development. Launched in 2021, the new railway line cuts through Guinaw Rails, one of the capital’s most popular suburbs, forcing many residents to leave their homes, which were demolished to make way for the tracks. The filmmaker Mamadou Khouma Gueye’s mother, Sohkna Ndiaye, who had lived in the neighborhood for around forty years, is among those displaced. The RET project highlights the growing inequalities within the country: while part of the population — young, relatively well-off, and French-speaking — benefits from economic growth driven by ties to the West, another part — more modest, rooted in tradition, and often with little or no command of French — finds itself increasingly excluded.
In The Attachment (Liti Liti), Mamadou Khouma Gueye documents the upheaval caused by the RET project in the lives of his mother and the Guinaw Rails community. The feature-length documentary had its world premiere at Visions du Réel 2025, in the International Feature Film Competition. Filmed over several years, it weaves together conversations between the filmmaker and his mother with cinéma vérité sequences, capturing scenes of daily life at the heart of the neighborhood, with a temporality that is at times complex to grasp.
Before her son’s camera, Sohkna Ndiaye speaks of her attachment to this neighborhood where her children were born and where a true community has taken shape over time. It offers its members financial support — through “tontines,” a collective savings system that allowed Sohkna to buy her furniture — as well as psychological support, through the strong bonds uniting them in their daily lives. Sohkna expresses her sorrow over the end of the shared meals with the women of her community, when each could eat from another’s dish — a true expression of collective spirit and sharing. This solidarity, so deeply rooted in the neighborhood, is now threatened by the forced displacement of residents, and more broadly by the Western influence that is destabilizing local dynamics.
In this respect, The Attachment (Liti Liti) calls to mind Lowland Kids by Sandra Winther, presented at CPH:DOX this year, which documents the impact of displacement and the erosion of community bonds, this time in the face of environmental upheaval.
Film Fest Report was an accredited media at Visions du Réel 2025, running on March 4-13, 2025.
