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Many African Stories Remain Untold.
If we don’t tell our own stories, someone else will.
Two sons of Senegal met in the hallways of NYU Tisch school of art in New York City. Maba Ba and Mamadou Dia shared their love for storytelling, humanity and their birth country. They decided to team up to tell stories that show a view of the world from their underrepresented perspective. JoyeDidi was born.
JoyeDidi means Seven in Fulani, a number they both connect to deeply.
About
JoyeDidi
Our Projects
Taxi Cab Teranga
A day in the life of Omar, a Senegalese taxi driver in New York City, who learns that any day could be his last.
Samedi Cinema
In a small town in the north of Senegal, two young avid cinephiles Baba and Sembene are desperate to see a movie on the big screen of their local cinema before it closes its door forever.
Paramour
Adam, a young fashion designer in New York City in the verge of giving up his passion meets Eva, A young photographer full of life and passion who help him have a new outlook on life.
The Story
Baamum Nafi
Nafi's Father
A moderate imam in a small town in northern Senegal is fighting his extremely religious and powerful brother about the marriage of their children.
Mamadou Dia
Mamadou Dia is a Senegalese director and director of photography currently based in New York, where he completed his MFA in Filmmaking at Tisch School of the Arts (NYU) in 2017. Shaped by this training and his experience working as a video-journalist for over eight years across the African continent, his stories explore the fine balance between fiction and fact, narrative and documentary. His latest short, Samedi Cinema (2016), premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. In the past year, it has been featured in over 70 festivals around the world and won a dozen awards. Nafi’s father is his first feature script. On the basis of this script, he was selected to attend the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival's Talent Writing Lab and was awarded a writing grant from the Hubert Bals fund.
The Founders
Maba Ba
Maba grew up in Senegal where very often he could be found telling and hearing stories around a couple of candles and entertaining his family members while waiting for the electricity to come back on. It was at that very young age that he started to appreciate the unlimited power of stories. After acquiring knowledge in Computer science at Old Dominion University, He moved to New York to continue education in 3D animation and Acting. He then immersed himself in the Film, Tech and 3D animation world.
Maba is an actor, producer and director with titles such as #WarGames (MGM), Christmas Wedding Baby (Netflix) and award winning shorts such as Samedi Cinema (TIFF, Venice), Men or Mice (Urbanworld) to name a few.
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