Born in Paris in 1972 to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Alain Gomis makes fiction on the threshold of documentary, shaped by exile and the lingering aftershocks of colonisation. A Senegalese student without papers in Paris, a singer crossing Kinshasa to save her son, a man living his last day in Dakar: his characters confront the blind spots of history. Gomis describes his cinema as “an ‘I’ that says ‘we’”. For more than twenty years he has worked with the same crew, and he claims collective authorship of “Dao”, his latest film. In Dakar, he founded the Centre Yennenga, where he trains a new generation of West African filmmakers.