Ramata – A film of Great poetry
Ramata, a woman in her golden age is forced to relive her past when she engages herself in an affair with a younger man.
Ramata and her husband live in Les Almadies, an elegant neighbourhood of Dakar in Senegal. She is a faithful wife until she coincidentally meets, a Ngor Ndong, a mysterious hustler free of attachments.
Ramata is a very beautiful woman in her fifties. She is also a deeply wounded woman, a wound that dates back to her childhood and thus constitutive of who she is. Her encounter with Ngor Ndong awakens her grief that has been dormant for years. The awakening of her grief and revelation of her secret makes her affair with her young lover take a dramatic turn when the hidden chapter of her past comes back to haunt her.
Ngor Ndong is twenty-five. He is young, strong, mysterious and homeless. He is an occasional petty crook, known to the police. One evening, in a taxi that Ngor Ndong just happens to be driving, Ramata, reticent at first, finally agrees to follow this young man half her age, to the Copacabana, an area in the seediest part of Dakar. The two’s desire for one another and their growing love develops to a level where it brings more substance to their lives.
The film is based on the adaptation of a novel by Abasse Ndione and Leandre Alain Bakar about a woman in her fifties with a past that she desperately wants to erase, but is forced to confront her demons and an unsatisfactory image of herself by a young man that she takes on as her lover. Ramata’s encounter with Ngor takes her to the other side of the social spectrum and awakens a deep longing and desire, unsatisfied and intangible, which smoulders within her and that ultimately Ngor is not willing nor able to satisfy. An emotionally irrational need for Ngor plunges Ramata into an emotional abyss that unravels into self-destruction.
The Senegalese film premières this Saturday at the Goethe-Centre, doors open at 19 00.Tickets are N30.
