Mandabi

Unemployed and in his sixties, Ibrahima Dieng spends his days struggling to provide for his children and his two wives, until one day he receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a cousin in Paris. When he tries to cash it, he finds himself in a Kafkaesque maze that leads him from one counter to another but brings him no closer to his goal. Meanwhile, the news of the money order spreads like wildfire among his friends and acquaintances, who all hope to benefit from the windfall.

Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, known as the ‘godfather of African cinema’, was the first African film director to achieve international recognition in the 1960s. In his both humorous and bitingly critical second feature film from 1968, an adaptation of his own novella and the first film ever made in Wolof, he shows Senegal as a country scarred and plundered by colonialism and plagued by corruption and greed.