TIFF Midnight Madness World Premiere SALOUM (Senegal) is a cool and kinetic genre-shifting supernatural thriller in which a legendary trio of on-the-run mercenaries carrying a stolen gold bounty and a kidnapped drug lord take refuge in a remote and mystical area of Senegal, where creepy curses and sinister ancestral forces unleash hell on them all.
Uniquely inspired by African-Caribbean folklore and mysticism as well as western and action/horror hybrids such as From Dusk Till Dawn and Predator, SALOUM was written & directed by acclaimed African filmmaker Jean Luc Herbulot (Netflix’s Dealer, Canal + Afrique’s Sakho & Mangane) and is the producing debut of African filmmaker/entrepreneur Pamela Diop.
Writer/Director: Jean Luc Herbulot (Netflix’s Dealer, Canal + Afrique’s Sakho & Mangane)
Producer: Pamela Diop
Executive Producers: Douglas Jackson, Hus Miller
Co-Producer: Alexis Perrin
Principal Cast: Yann Gael (Duel au Soleil, They Had a Dream, Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, upcoming Netflix series 1889), Roger Sallah (Sakho & Mangane, Renaissance, upcoming Absa), Mentor Ba, Evelyne Ily Juhen
TIFF Film Info: https://tiff.net/events/saloum
SYNOPSIS:
Amidst Guinea-Bissau’s coup d’état of 2003, Bangui’s Hyenas, an elite trio of mercenaries, skillfully extract a drug dealer and his bricks — both gold and narcotic — from the chaos and make tracks for Dakar, Senegal. But when their escape plan is unexpectedly waylaid, the Hyenas find themselves and their bounty stranded in the Sine-Saloum Delta, a coastal river realm steeped in myth and mystery, where dark ancestral forces unleash hell on them all.
Writer-director Jean Luc Herbulot ignites the fuse of his inspired genre-shifting thriller, burning through exquisite episodes of suspense before exploding into full-blown action-horror. As with Herbulot’s Netflix series Sakho & Mangane, which stylishly wove a supernatural thread through a gripping police procedural’s own twisting trajectory compellingly invokes African-Caribbean folklore and mysticism as it refashions cues from western genre hybrids like From Dusk Till Dawn and Predator into its unique cultural context. The results are infectiously cool and an exhilarating introduction to a fascinating mythos full of creepy curses, sinister spirits, and an instantly iconic ensemble of horror heroes.
