SUN SEP 17, 2023 7:00 PM “Tauw” / MANDABI $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission) Los Feliz 3 | ‘Ousmane Sembène Centennial: An American Cinematheque Retrospective’ Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE FILMS: ”Tauw”, 1970, Dir: Ousmane Sembène, 27 Minutes, Riggin Rights, Senegal. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. “Tauw,” one of Sembène’s early short works, tells the story of two brothers in the generation after independence. Tauw, an unemployed 20-year-old, must deal with the consequences of the shifting morality and stifled job market in urban Senegal, while 11-year old Ouman must confront the contradictions of his religious instruction. FORMAT: DCP MANDABI, 1968, Dir: Ousmane Sembène, 91 Minutes, Janus Films, Senegal. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head. One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, MANDABI—an adaptation of a novella by the director himself—is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty. FORMAT: DCP