Screening for Wednesday 24 June: Mandabi

Please note that this week's film will be held on Wednesday, not the usual Tuesday, at 5:30pm.

Director: Ousmane Sembene
Country of origin: Senegal
Year of release: 1968
Run time: 90 minutes

Mandabi is the story of Ibrahim, an illiterate Senegalese villager who tries to cash a money order sent to him by a relative working in Paris, and somehow finds himself pitted against overwhelming bureaucratic and societal forces. Ibrahim is a lazy and vain but fundamentally decent man, and his unexpected windfall becomes the catalyst of his downfall—the means by which this simple, more-or-less honest, foible-ridden individual comes face-to-face with the indifference, the corruption of the modern world.

Ibrahim’s story takes on the quality of a comic fable, and Ousmane Sembene, keeping his characters at arm’s length, is able to convey their basic equality as creatures trying to survive in a confusing, unfair world. This mid-range staging is also perfect for creating a deliberate, unobtrusive sense of comedy, of human folly gently revealed. At the same time, the film is a window upon the culture of post-colonial Senegal, a world that seems poised uneasily between tradition (village life, Islam) and modernity (bureaucracy, crime, money-grubbing).

(Some info from imdb.com)