**Spirit Riders** *A Conversation with Mati Diop and Fatima Al Qadiri* MD: The violence in the movie is not American style, with guns and punches in the face. The film roots itself in the reality of social violence: how the boys have no choice but to take this boat because of the violence of capitalism, or how a girl like Ada’s only strategy for survival is marrying a rich man who made it to Europe. Ada embodies the steep price of becoming an independent woman in Dakar today. And so, the violence of the film is not specifically in the revenge-genre idiom, but more in its political background: the postcolonial, patriarchal and capitalist society. How this system pushed a whole generation to leave and die at sea; how it destroyed Ada and Soleiman’s love. FAQ: For me, these themes played out through the tradition of jinn — I’ve never heard of any jinn story in which the spirits are violent, where the jinn physically attack someone. Their entire purpose is to instill a really deep fear in the subject they’re haunting. Some of them have goals, some of them don’t, but I think the lack of physical touch in an encounter with the possessed is very true to jinn mythology. MD: Like you say, Fatima, I was conjuring an internal power, something hidden, playing out through the tension. I guess I have a very strong belief in cinema, in its capacity to create fear through invisible and subtle means.