Film: The Divine River

Ceremonial Pageantry In the Sahel
Wednesday, 6/25/2025
3:00 - 4:00
Golden Gate Valley Meeting Room
Golden Gate Valley

1801 Green Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
United States

415-355-5666

Condensed from 40 hours of footage, The Divine River is an exhilarating, hallucinatory, harrowing record of music, ritual, life and landscape along the Niger River—which the Tuareg call Egerew n-Igerewen, or "River of Rivers"— as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger. Traversing 300 miles of this transitional zone between the Sahara and the Savanna, The Divine River is not a linear record of a journey so much as a phantasmagoria of visual associations that create their own emotional topography and chronology, always accompanied by music that blurs the lines between sacred and secular, past and present.

Highlights include intimate views of ecstatic dance in the painted houses of the island-dwelling Wogo; the seductive courtship rites and trance vocals of young Wodaabe men; a mesmeric Tuareg and Zarma duet for guitar and molo; Hausa griots enchanting with comsaa strings; Zarma spirit possession ceremonies; and heart-stopping footage of the Dogon mask ritual atop the Bandiagara Escarpment in the village of Endele.

NR, 47 min., 2012. No narration. Directed by Hisham Mayet. 

This program made possible with kind permission from Sublime Frequencies. 

 

Film & Video

Watch party and film discussions. 

SWANA Interest

This program honors the diverse cultures, traditions and histories of Southwest Asian and North African heritage.

This program is sponsored by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Attending Programs

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This program will be conducted in English unless otherwise noted.

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