7915 Km (2008):
Director: Nicholas Geyrhalter,

Review from Artforum:

For his most recent film, 7915 Km (2008), Geyrhalter didn’t just go to the Sahara and western Africa whenever; he went during the Dakar Rally, an overland race that’s hugely popular among gearheads and joyriding Europeans. To many Africans, it resembles an alien visitation. One girl explains she named her goat Rally because it was born the day the foreign drivers came through her village. But the race, inevitably, also stirs resentment and tears up roads; the dust, once kicked up, seems to linger, the residue of a drive-by moment that encapsulates, for Geyrhalter and many of his subjects, the glamour, elusiveness, and cruel disregard of the near but distant West.

Pointedly, the only images of the rally proper in 7915 Km come from revved-up publicity materials and European TV programs. Geyrhalter and his crew purposefully fall behind the pack, training their sights on other subjects. In Senegal, a local carpenter speaks of the demand for “boats of death” hired by would-be immigrants. In Mali, young African men who haven’t already left for Europe wait around at Western Union all day for allowances from relatives abroad; night after night, they watch the same European porn film at what has to be one of the world’s saddest movie theaters.

The film’s final segment, shot in an airplane that Italian immigration authorities use to patrol their borders, ends with a grainy image of African refugees being intercepted at sea. It’s an effective juxtaposition: the Africans’ slow, easily captured boats and the European’s speedy jeeps, trucks, planes, and rally cars.

Link.