Entangling the stigmas of albinism and mental illness in Adams Sie’s Oumy et moi and Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte

This article examines how contemporary Senegalese filmmakers Adams Sie and Khady Sylla depict the stigmatization of albinism and mental illness in their documentaries Oumy et moi and Une fenêtre ouverte . We analyse the representation of the close relationships between the filmmakers and their stigmatized subjects through the concept of entanglement. Relying on this critical framework, we present the unique ways in which Sie and Sylla intimately document the subjective process of being stigmatized in Senegalese society and foreground their own individual struggles to defy and combat stigmatization. Ultimately, we argue that in Oumy et moi and Une fenêtre ouverte , Sie and Sylla create new forms of documentary cinema that reconfigure standard dynamics between documentarian, subject and viewer. Consequently, these cinematic strategies reveal and deconstruct the Senegalese social and cultural contexts that typically stigmatize and hierarchize people with albinism and mental illness.