“You promised to dig to the very last grain of sand.”
The Village is Always Watching
Banel & Adama — Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut feature, Palme d’Or nominated, Senegal’s Academy Award submission, is set in a remote village in northern Senegal, and it never lets you forget that the village is a character. It watches Banel (Khady Mane) with the same relentlessness that she watches the horizon. The land is drying out. The cattle are dying. And Banel wants out of a future she never chose.
One of our larger audiences at Aftersun settled in. By the credits, nobody was ready to leave.
The room opened up quickly, and in a direction that felt important: many Aftersunettes found themselves unable to sympathise with Banel. Not because her desire for something different was wrong — most people in that room understood that impulse — but because of what she was willing to let burn in pursuit of it. Her ambitions, her refusals, her silences that function like decisions. She wants to undig a buried house. She wants Adama to reject his birthright as future chief. She wants the world to rearrange itself around the shape of her wanting. And when it doesn’t — when the rains don’t come, and things begin to fall apart — the film refuses to fully exonerate her. Or condemn her either.
That ambiguity cracked the room open.
Someone asked: is Banel a feminist hero or a figure of tragedy? The answer, frustratingly and correctly, was both. Sy draws her from the tradition of Greek tragic heroines — Medea, Phaedra — women whose refusal to submit becomes something close to destruction. That doesn’t make the refusal wrong. It makes it real. The film, as one Aftersunette put it, isn’t asking us to approve of Banel. It’s asking us to reckon with what the world does to a person who won’t comply.
Adama attracted just as much heat. Quiet, introverted, genuinely in love — but passive in a way that started to read as its own kind of refusal. He supports Banel, and then doesn’t. He refuses his duty to the village, and then reconsiders. The argument in the room was sharp: is Adama a gentle man caught between two impossible loyalties, or is his passivity a form of cowardice — the thing that ultimately abandons Banel even as he stays physically present? Both readings had defenders. Neither fully won.
What the discussion kept circling back to, in different words, was the question Sy herself has said the film was built around: how do you live with your individuality without rejecting your community? Kampala is not a northern Senegalese village, but that question is not unfamiliar here. We know what it feels like for a community to have expectations. We know what it costs to want something the collective hasn’t made room for. We had disagreements in that room — real ones — about whether Banel was brave or reckless, whether Adama was kind or weak, whether the village’s disapproval was cruelty or just consequence.
That’s the kind of disagreement that doesn’t resolve. It lingers, which is exactly what a film like this deserves.
Design Hub held us well. Something was fitting about being in a new space for a film about people trying to build one of their own.
Banel & Adama is the kind of film Aftersun was built around — not because it’s African, though it is, and not because it’s beautiful, though it is that too, but because it holds a question the mainstream won’t sit with long enough to let breathe. Films like this one rarely find their way to Kampala screens. We think that’s a problem worth fixing, one Aftersun gathering at a time.
Our May pop-up season runs through the whole month, starting 1st May at 58 Ssebowa Road, Kyambogo. Tickets are 21,000 UGX — reservations via our site: ticket.aftersuncinema.com.
Come for the film. Stay for the argument.
Take Care.
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