Rama Thiaw

Mauritanian and Senegalese, born in 1978 in Nouakchott, Thiaw grew up between Mauritania, Senegal and Europe. After starting with poetry and drawing, Thiaw was graduating with master’s degrees in international economics, sociology and cinema. Then she began in the industry working for two years in production in Paris. Since 2006, she has been a Writer-Director-DOP-Editor. After two short films, she started to write, to film and direct her first feature documentary Boul Fallé La voie de la lutte. (2009). Based in Dakar, she created her Senegalese production company Boul Fallé Images, in 2010. Produced by her company, her second feature- documentary, The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, was released in 2016 and received several awards from the industry, most specially at the Berlinale, where she won the major prize of the Forum Section.

She is working on the completion of her third documentary feature, a work of 15 years in the making, Zion Music, which will be released in 2026. With this part of her career in her rearview, she is looking forward to the next steps and projects: The Vanishing, a feature essay about the disappearance of her mother and Life in Spiral, a feature gangster film, based on Abbas Ndione’s Book.

In 2019, she curated and organized the first edition of the “Artistic Sabbars of Dakar”, a multidisciplinary cultural event dedicated to African women, Afro-descendant and Black women, in the fields of cinema, literature, contemporary art, social sciences and research, dance and performance.

https://sabbararts.cargo.site

In addition to her work as a filmmaker, producer and curator, she has trained artists-technicians for years with her own company.

She has also been a mentor at numerous industry events and markets (Generation Africa, Ladima Fondation, Durban Talent) as well giving film courses in colleges (Mount Holyoke- Smith College- Amherst – Hampshire- University of Massachusetts Amherst in Boston, and around, as a visiting professor).

During the past years, she has been invited as a festival jury member or president (St Louis Doc, Besancon, FIPA, FIPADOC, Istanbul Experimental), but also been part of Fund’s Committee such as (Hot Docs, Chicken&Eggs, OIF etc.), and curator and programmer at the Berlinale – Panorama Section- between the 2020 and 2022.