by Aadil Cheema for Winter Film Festival
See the 30-minute short documentary The Fishing Boats of Kayar on February 21 @12:00PM at REGAL Union Square (850 Broadway) as part of New York City’s 14th Annual Winter Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
Documentary “The Fishing Boats of Kayar” (Los Cayucos De Kayar) eschews the typical structure of immigration stories to create a complex and communal portrait of Senegalese actor Thimbo Samb and his birthplace.
We are living in a moment of escalating anti-immigrant violence and inhumane policy. “The Fishing Boats of Kayar,” a new documentary short from Spain, takes those currents as its point of departure. It opens on a social media post depicting a North African beach covered by hundreds of empty canoes all facing the incoming turquoise surf of the Atlantic Ocean. Its caption reads: “North Africa. Don’t tell us later that it’s not an invasion.”
The film that follows the deliberately misleading and fear-mongering post stands poised to counter its xenophobia by showing us everything its anonymous author obfuscated and omitted. The documentary offers an emotional and complex portrait of migration from the perspective of a man who comes from a place very similar to the one in the opening photo. It follows Thimbo Samb, a Senegalese actor who emigrated to Spain nearly two decades ago, as he returns to his birthplace of Kayar, a fishing town on the coast of Senegal.
The first shot we see of Kayar mirrors the post. The camera glides over the beach and the canoes which cover its sand. Yet, unsurprisingly, there is no invading army poised on the shore, just humble fisherman who pile nets and ropes into their pirogues with dazzling painted hulls and set off into the sea to sing some songs and try to make a living. The sea has long sustained the residents of Kayar, but industrial fishing has made them increasingly reliant on remittances from relatives who emigrated. When he was just 17 years old, Samb left Kayar in one of those fishing boats and made the perilous journey to Spain in the hopes of earning enough money to support his parents.
The immigrant’s journey is a familiar narrative of which “The Fishing Boats of Kayar” gives us a few glimpses. In an especially wrenching conversation with his mother, Samb divulges that he spent his first three months in Spain living on the street, eating out of trash bins where “white people threw their food away.” He also speaks of the joy and freedom he found in acting and the theater. To its credit, the film doesn’t linger on his passage to Spain or the rigors of building a life there. Instead, the film becomes as much a portrait of Kayar and its people as it is of Thimbo Samb. “The idea was to explore the theme of migration from the perspective of a town,” said Álvaro Hernández Blanco, the film’s Spanish director, “And how the phenomenon affects the whole village.”
Blanco met Samb while he was casting a film and a friend recommended the Senegalese actor for a role. The production fell through, but the pair continued their correspondence. Around that time, Blanco published a book based on his experience of living in Tijuana and interviews he conducted with Central American migrants he met there. Samb had been looking for someone to help novelize his life story and turned to Blanco for a partner. The book turned into a movie when words no longer felt sufficient. “There came a point where I told him, ‘I need to see and feel and smell this place firsthand,’” recalled Blanco. So, camera in hand, Blanco accompanied Samb while he visited his family in Kayar for a few days that summer.
The pair collaborated to film intimate, sometimes difficult conversations as they sketched the emotional and psychological impact migration has had on Samb and the people of Kayar. We end up hearing as much from Samb’s relatives and neighbors as we do from our ostensible main character, which democratizes the story. We watch Samb as he listens to his friends lament the economic hardships and government neglect which encourage young people to repeatedly hazard their lives for a chance to reach Europe. We watch as Samb’s younger brother, Mbaye, and his friends seek shelter from the midday sun in a sliver of shade and discuss their aspirations while joking around like typical teenagers. What we learn of them in a few precious minutes lingers and expands long after the credits. “The lasting thing about this movie is that they become human beings,” said Blanco. “If they are human beings in your mind first, then that really changes your perspective on the whole idea of immigration policy and what your responsibility is to other human beings.”
Though documentary is too often a realm of formal restraint in service of supposed realism, Blanco deploys several symbolic gestures to convey the sensation of migration, of being between two places and not quite at home in either. These clever metaphors — a loyal homing pigeon that never forgets where it came from, tea poured back and forth between two cups, an Argentinian song about yearning to return to a mother’s soothing embrace — make the emotions of those touched by migration accessible to anyone in the audience who has ever felt homesick, felt out of place, missed their mother. By crafting a sincere and moving portrait of Kayar and its people, Blanco and Samb remind us of the humanity that binds us all.
About Winter Film Festival
Winter Film Festival is an all-volunteer women and minority-run organization as part of Winter Film Awards Inc, a 501(c)3 organization founded in 2011 to celebrate emerging talent in local and international filmmaking.
The 14th Annual Winter Film Festival runs February 18-22 2026 includes a diverse mixture of animated films, documentaries, comedies, romances, dramas, horror films, music videos and web series of all lengths. Our five-day event is jam-packed with screenings and Q&A sessions at NYC’s REGAL Union Square, six Education sessions/workshops and a variety of filmmaker networking events all coming to a glittering close on February 22 with our red-carpet gala Awards Ceremony.
Winter Film Festival programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Promotional support provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment.
For more information about Winter Film Festival, visit WinterFilmFest.org
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