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TEAM
ROSALIND FREDERICKS DIRECTOR, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Rosalind is is an urban geographer and Associate Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized study, specializing in urban environmental social movements in West Africa. She has been working in Senegal for over 20 years conducting research on the politics of waste and waste labor in the country’s capital, Dakar. Her book Garbage Citizenship, which was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies, chronicled the municipal waste workers’ union as it battled for respect and improved working conditions in the wake of structural adjustment.
The Waste Commons emerged out of her ethnographic research (supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation) with waste pickers at Dakar's dump since 2016 and her advocacy work with the association of Mbeubeuss waste pickers and the non-profit organization WIEGO that defends the rights of waste pickers globally. It builds on her book manuscript about the transformation of waste labor at Mbeubeuss (including over 200 interviews, 9 months of participant observation, and extensive archival research). It is her first documentary film.
SARITA WEST PRODUCER, WRITER, EDITOR
Sarita has been making natural history films and social documentaries for 27 years. Sarita established Alchemy Films in San Francisco in 1994. She wrote, directed and produced two award-winning 35mm short fiction films before making the orangutan documentary, The Disenchanted Forest (2004) for National Geographic Channels. Sarita co-produced the PBS documentary, The Split Horn (2003) and was an associate producer on the PBS documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006). In London, Sarita produced, directed and edited Fire Burn Babylon (2010), Exiles and Outlaws (2014) and has produced short films for The Guardian and Barts N.H.S. Trust. Sarita shot, edited, directed and produced In The Shadow of Ebola (2015) for PBS/Independent Lens and The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016) for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sarita is post-producing Outspoken, a social justice rap documentary partially filmed in Senegal, Kenya and Liberia. In recent years Alchemy Films has sought stories that consider life in the Anthropocene.
MAMADOU DIA PRODUCER
Mamadou is an award-winning Senegalese film director, screenwriter, and co-founder of the production company, Joyedidi. Often based on his life growing up in West Africa, Mr. Dia’s films explore the tension between fact and fiction, realism and abstraction. His short film, Samedi Cinema, opened at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals in 2016 and received numerous accolades. Baamum Nafi (Nafi's Father), his first feature film, premiered in 2019, winning two Golden Leopards for “First Feature”, and “Filmmakers of the Present'' at the Locarno International Film Festival. It was selected for MOMA/Lincoln Center’s 2020 New Directors/New Films, the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival Talent Lab, and the 2018 Hubert Bals writing grant. Senegal chose Baamum Nafi as its Oscar entry for Best International Feature in 2021. Mamadou Dia received an MFA in Filmmaking from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017 and is an Assistant Professor of Practice with a joint appointment in French at the University of Virginia. He was recently awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Film-Video category.
EVELYN FRANKS EDITOR