After being kicked out of her African village three decades earlier for getting pregnant out of wedlock, Linguere (Ami Diakhate) has returned home. While Linguere has done well for herself, her home village has fallen on hard economic times. Intent on punishing Dramaan (Mansour Diouf), the man who fathered her child but refused to own up to the act, Linguere makes a proposal: She will help the town financially, if the locals agree to execute Dramaan....

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. An adaptation of a novella by the director himself is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption,...

"With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a fractured portrait of the disenchantment of postindependence Senegal in the early 1970s. In this picaresque fantasy-drama, the disaffected young lovers Anta and Mory, fed up with Dakar, long to escape to the glamour and comforts they imagine France has to offer, but their plan is confounded by obstacles both practical and mystical. Alternately manic and meditative,...

A story about a man who receives a money order that threatens to destroy the traditional fabric of his life is used to point out the problems of modern Africa as a civilization struggling to recapture its own rich heritage after colonial corruption.

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun and Le Franc are masterpieces of the medium-length form, completed by Mambéty in his final years. They give us a fuller picture of the elements that define his small but perfect filmography, rich social vision, sly humor, and formal ingenuity.