Lagos-based documentary filmmaker Kehinde Temitope Odutayo shoots an eight-minute observational film across three days in Dakar and Gorée Island, finding in the periphery of a gathering of Africa’s most significant artistic voices the real film that no programme could have planned.
The logic of event coverage is familiar: find the podium, record the speech, cut the highlights. Kehinde Temitope Odutayo was not interested in that film.
“I wasn’t interested in documenting an event,” he says. “I was interested in what the event made possible, the conversations that drift away from the stage, the moments of recognition between artists who have never shared a room before. That felt like the real film.”
Arete Annual 2025 is an eight-minute observational documentary commissioned by Arete Arts Foundation, following the first edition of the gathering in Dakar and Gorée Island, Senegal in November 2025. The film positions the camera not at the podium but at the periphery: among the guests, the listeners, the witnesses. Sculptors, painters, architects, photographers and performance artists, among them Sokari Douglas Camp, Barthélémy Toguo, Tosin Oshinowo, Lady Skollie, Taiye Idahor and Mario Macilau, are caught not in prepared statements but in the unguarded exchanges where genuine thinking happens. The collective is the subject. No single artist is profiled. What the film documents is a temporary, unrepeatable ecology of thought.
The methodology was deliberately unobtrusive across three full days of shooting. Rather than constructing moments, Odutayo and cinematographer Jigar Ganatra read the room, identifying the quality of silence before a response, the geometry of a listening body, the unrehearsed laugh or gesture that reveals more than any prepared statement. Editing followed the same logic, resisting chronology in favour of emotional and intellectual rhythm. Sound design treated the ambient audio from the sessions as a compositional element, with the voices of the artists given the weight they carried in the room. Music from Sahad Sarr and The Nataal Patchwork, alongside Music Beyond, grounds the film in the cultural texture of Dakar.
The deepest inspiration behind the project was a conviction that African creative discourse is routinely documented about rather than from within. Arete Annual 2025 sets out to honour the interior of such a gathering, not its polished exterior.
Kehinde Temitope Odutayo is a Lagos-based documentary filmmaker and Creative Director at KKG Films. For over six years he has embedded himself in communities across Africa and the Middle East to tell stories about culture, environment and the people who carry both.
Website: kehindeodutayo.com Instagram: @kt_odutayo
Arete Annual 2025, 2025. 8-minute documentary. Cinematography: Jigar Ganatra and Kehinde Temitope Odutayo. Edited by Kehinde Temitope Odutayo. Still photography: Shem Compion. Music: Yusubu Kasereka, Yeremia Vindu, Answer Kaviti (Music Beyond) and Sahad Sarr and The Nataal Patchwork. Watch the documentary at youtu.be/r1RqinjONA8.
