Feature film
Touki Bouki
Djibril Diop Mambéty · 1973
Synopsis
Mory, a young cowherd who rides a motorbike decorated with a horned animal's skull, and Anta, a student in Dakar, meet. Disappointed with their country, they think only of leaving for Paris, and money is needed: they cook up schemes, then Mory strips Charlie, a rich man who took him home, of his clothes and his car. Dressed this way, they book their passage on a boat to France. Around them, animals are slaughtered at the abattoir, and a song promises Paris to whoever hears it.
Context
It is its author's first feature film, shot in Wolof; the cinematography is by Pap Samba Sow, and Magaye Niang and Mareme Niang play the two roles. It was selected in 1973 at Cannes by the Directors' Fortnight and received the International Critics' Prize there, before an award at the Moscow festival. The World Cinema Foundation restored it in 2008, and Cannes screened it again the same year. It ranks sixty-sixth in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, and one of its scenes was reused in 2018 in a Jay-Z and Beyoncé video.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and a half, in subtitled Wolof, with a fragmented editing. One has to accept the breaks in continuity.
Prizes and reception
Awarded prizes at Cannes and Moscow in the year of its release, restored in 2008, it is today among the African films most often ranked by world critics.
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