Old men who brutally and relentlessly cling on to their roles as heads of state have become colossally negative images in many countries of Africa, including Senegal.
When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state. The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is a film about a country in the grip of change, in which two thirds of the population are under 25 and long for new beginnings.