The Revolution Won’t Be Televised

When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up “Y’en a marre” (“We Are Fed Up”), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips from an “insider” perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of “kingmaker” in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.