Coastal village of Senegal on the border of the Atlantic Ocean. Grandpa to a fisherman grandpa who sees more plastic trash in his nets than fish. A group of women with injured hands collect pebbles on the beach to sell them for a minimum income. And the question that comes back is: How long can this planet replenish the natural resources that we humans waste so thoughtlessly?

That’s more or less what “Letter from Yeni,” a special documentary by Robe Diawar, premiered on Tuesday evening at the Vassilis and Eliza Goulandris Foundation.

Commissioned by PCAI (Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative), Serpentine Gallery and online platform MUBI, the film is part of the latter’s Back to Earth program, which invites a wide range of artists, scientists and thinkers to creatively respond to the environmental crisis.

For his part, Diawara, a writer, filmmaker and cultural theorist, is an adjunct professor at New York University and director of the Institute for African American Affairs. “Very American” despite his African roots, as he himself admits at one point in the film. He ended up in Yeni in the last few years, when he bought a country house by the sea and began to observe the life of the locals while spending his holidays.

Somewhere between a poetic record and a documentary, his film doesn’t have a very structured narrative or cinematic rhythm, but it does have a few remarkably pertinent comments, the most notable of which is the collective responsibility to nature. The other side of the coin, of course, which Diawara also points out, is that the people of Yeni live in near-absolute poverty as the big fishing boats, mostly Chinese, that fish off the coast destroy their own livelihoods. . It is also difficult to criticize pebble collectors when this is the only source of (miserable) income.

Of course, the significance of Diawara’s message is not only local. “My first exposure to Diawara’s filmography was during Documenta in Athens, but I was already familiar with his wonderful theoretical texts on cinema and the African diaspora. His research and concerns about uncontrolled urbanization in Yeni are directly related to PCAI issues. The film’s environmental message begins with a small fishing village in Senegal, but reflects global issues related to the environmental crisis and is an important impetus for discussion and further reflection,” PCAI Artistic Director Kika Kiriakaku tells us.

“Letter from Yeni” will be screened again this Friday (April 28) at 19:00 in the hall of the Goulandris Foundation (Eratosthenus 13) and can also be booked online (Click here).