Mandabi

Ousmane Sembène

IndieLisboa 2020 •

France, Senegal, Fiction, 1968, 105′

A Senegalese middle-aged man, unemployed, lives with his two wives and kids in Dakar. When he receives a money order from his son, working in Paris, bureaucratic problems arise in order to cash the money. Sembène turns his attention, for the first time, to the corruption of daily life in his country, fulfilling his dream to direct a film entirely spoken in his Wolof language. Despite censorship, the film received the international critics’ prize in Venice.