Touki Bouki
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Djibril Diop Mambéty’s first feature-length film is one of the great works of African cinema and probably the most experimental. Having taken his cattle to the slaughterhouse, the young cowherd Mory drives around Dakar on a motorcycle adorned with horns. He meets Anta, a student, and dreams of going to Paris with her, to that “small corner of Paradise”. To raise money for the trip, they try their luck with a variety of con schemes.
Bursting at the seams with creativity, this film is a crazy, captivating study of the African fascination for the promises of the Western world. This fascination is also expressed in the careening style of self-taught filmmaker Mambéty: Touki Bouki brings together film noir and nouvelle vague, comedy and social criticism, and functions as a strong counterpoint to the wave of blaxploitation films during the same period. The film’s resolution may be bitter, but the staging says that anything goes. In a series of fantasy sequences, Mory and Anta simply project themselves to Paris and elsewhere.
Touki Bouki
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, 35 mm, colour, Wolof & French, German subtitles
Bursting at the seams with creativity, this film is a crazy, captivating study of the African fascination for the promises of the Western world. This fascination is also expressed in the careening style of self-taught filmmaker Mambéty: Touki Bouki brings together film noir and nouvelle vague, comedy and social criticism, and functions as a strong counterpoint to the wave of blaxploitation films during the same period. The film’s resolution may be bitter, but the staging says that anything goes. In a series of fantasy sequences, Mory and Anta simply project themselves to Paris and elsewhere.
Touki Bouki
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, 35 mm, colour, Wolof & French, German subtitles
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