Mandabi

The second feature by trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (Black Girl) was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward realizing Sembène’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. When an unemployed man receives a money order for 25,000 francs from his nephew in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads. His neighbors flock to him for loans even as his attempts to cash the order are stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down. One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, this 1968 adaptation of the director’s own novella is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty.