Producers' Forum: Third World Newsreel: African Spiritualities Night One - AI: African Intelligence by Manthia Diawara

AI: African Intelligence by Manthia Diawara

(Portugal, 2022, 110 min)

Manthia Diawara’s latest essay film, AI: African Intelligence, explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession among traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technology frontiers known as artificial intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from disembodied machines toward a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of the emergence of such improbable algorithms?

Manthia Diawara is a writer, filmmaker, and distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and Film at New York University. Diawara’s notable films include: A Letter from Yene (2022), An Opera of the World (2017), Négritude: A Dialogue between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor (2016), and Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010).