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  • Safi Faye – Mossane (1996)

    1991-2000African CinemaArthouseDramaSafi FayeSenegal

    This Senegalese melodrama tells the story of a young girl called Mossane who lives in a village between the ocean and the savannah. There, veneration for the traditions is very common. There’s a legend saying that every other century a girl is born who is doomed because of her beauty. Mossane is only fourteen years old but is already considered to be extraordinary beautiful. Even her own brother is in love with her. According to the custom she has been promised to a rather wealthy man called Diogoye since the day of her birth. However, Mossane is in love with the poor student Fara who is forced to return to the village while the university is on strike. Torn between her own dreams and traditions, Mossane decides to escape. The film shows the resistance of the young generation and is dedicated especially to the African women, their courage and their wish for emancipation.Read More »

  • Matteo Garrone – Io Capitano AKA Me Captain (2023)

    Matteo Garrone2001-2010DramaItaly

    Quote:
    A Homeric fairy tale that tells the adventurous journey of two young boys, Seydou and Moussa, who leave Dakar to reach Europe. A contemporary Odyssey through the dangers of the desert, of the sea and the ambiguities of the human soul.Read More »

  • Ousmane Sembene – Ceddo (1977)

    1971-1980African CinemaArthouseDramaOusmane SembeneSenegal
    Ceddo (1977)
    Ceddo (1977)

    In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.Read More »

  • Ousmane Sembene – Emitaï AKA God of Thunder (1971)

    Ousmane Sembene1971-1980African CinemaDramaPoliticsSenegal
    Emitaï (1971)
    Emitaï (1971)

    With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe’s patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army’s wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.Read More »

  • Djibril Diop Mambéty – Contras’ City (1968)

    1961-1970African CinemaDjibril Diop MambétyDocumentarySenegalShort Film

    Publisher’s description:
    The satirical documentary Contras’ City (which stands for Contrast City) was shot on 16mm in 1968. It is one of the earliest African comic movie and an urban planning analysis of the “two Dakars”. It is considered the first African comedy. It is a satire on Dakar – a city in which styles and cultures are blended in a cosmopolitan small area. Mambety manipulates the classic documentary apparatus with the object of exploring social conflicts of the capital city.Read More »

  • Ababacar Samb-Makharam – Kodou (1971)

    1971-1980Ababacar Samb-MakharamAfrican CinemaDramaSenegal

    A young girl, Kodou, submits herself, somewhat out of bravado, to a tattooing practice. But in the middle of the ceremony, and while the matrons are singing to her, Kodou runs away – a serious offence to the age-old traditions of the village. Kodou’s family feels discredited, her friends make fun of her. Confined to a quasi-quarantine, Kodou goes mad and violently attacks the young children. Her parents end up taking her to a psychiatric hospital run by a European doctor, but to no avail. They then decide to submit her to a traditional exorcism session. Then Kodou is brought back home. Will she be cured?Read More »

  • Safi Faye – Mossane (1997)

    Safi Faye1981-1990African CinemaArthouseDramaSenegal

    Quote:
    This Senegalese melodrama tells the story of a young girl called Mossane who lives in a village between the ocean and the savannah. There, veneration for the traditions is very common. There’s a legend saying that every other century a girl is born who is doomed because of her beauty. Mossane is only fourteen years old but is already considered to be extraordinary beautiful. Even her own brother is in love with her. According to the custom she has been promised to a rather wealthy man called Diogoye since the day of her birth. However, Mossane is in love with the poor student Fara who is forced to return to the village while the university is on strike. Torn between her own dreams and traditions, Mossane decides to escape. The film shows the resistance of the young generation and is dedicated especially to the African women, their courage and their wish for emancipation.Read More »

  • Momar Thiam – Baks (1974)

    1961-1970African CinemaDramaMomar ThiamSenegal

    Quote:
    This is certainly the first African film to tackle the problem of street children and drugs. Idrissa is a rebellious little boy who drops out of school and joins a gang of hooligans that live on the beaches of Dakar. He gradually becomes detached from his family and adopted by his new friends who initiate him into the art of theft and the pleasures of yamba, marijuana. In his new role as a “tough guy”, Idrissa becomes Boy Idi and begins to push joints. Everybody seems to smoke in Dakar. “Even respectable people do it”, says one of the small drug pushers. Whilst Idrissa’s father loses interest in the fate of his son, his mother decides to go to the police and an inspector sets off to hunt down the gang.Read More »

  • Djibril Diop Mambéty – Hyènes AKA Hyenas (1992)

    1991-2000African CinemaDjibril Diop MambétyDocumentaryDramaSenegal

    One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki is a hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which in Mambéty’s imagining follows a now-rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by western materialism.Read More »

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