Diptych
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Two political and dazzling medium-length films, from an unfinished project by the Senegalese filmmaker who died in 1998, come out in a restored version.
“Little people are my idols. I have no other heroes,” said Djibril Diop Mambety, monument of Senegalese cinema, who died in 1998 before he might finish the trilogy he intended to dedicate to them. For them, the little ones, he invented a great cinema made up of a thousand things, drawing bursts of humor, oddity, poetic innocence, cheerful cruelty from their journeys. From his unfinished project, there remain two medium-length films that JHR Films is releasing this summer in a restored version. Two pocket odysseys, festive and political, licked by the waves of the vast ocean.
Haunting question of money
The most commonly appreciated is undoubtedly the second tale, released posthumously in 1999. Starting from the slums of the capital, the little sun seller spreads out in modern Dakar, where wandering children sell newspapers at auction. A lame, strong-headed little girl who lives off begging, finds a place for herself in the territory of the boys by starting to sell, too, the sun – this is the name of the big local daily, a canard close to the government. He will have to overcome the hostility of the other small newspaper peddlers, who are waging a merciless turf war once morest him.
Four years earlier, Djibril Diop Mambety opened his Stories of little people with a farcical road trip, the Franc (1994). A film of expanses and wastelands, where a penniless musician wanders his hopes of hitting the jackpot in the lottery. If luck smiles on the mountebank, immediately…
