Djibril Diop Mambéty: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, TOUKI BOUKI and HYENAS. Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of the story of the director’s enormous accomplishments in his too-brief life. Two masterpieces of the medium-length form (featurette or moyen métrage) that Mambéty completed in his final years provide us a fuller picture of the elements that define his small, but perfect, filmography—a rich social vision, sly humor, and formal ingenuity. Mambéty initially meant for these films to lead off a trilogy to be titled “Tales of Ordinary People,” but sadly lived only to complete “Le Franc” and “The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun.”

In “Le Franc”, a broke musician (Dieye Ma) comes upon a lottery ticket after his beloved instrument is confiscated by his landlady (Mambéty regular, Aminata Fall); and in the posthumously released “The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun”, a young girl (an electric Lissa Balera in her first and only on screen performance) decides to sell newspapers on the streets, despite the fact that boys have historically run that racket. The two films function beautifully as a pair of magical realist works grounded in the political realities of Dakar. It is with great pleasure that we present two major works by one of contemporary cinema’s greatest filmmakers.