Mandabi (1968) (Criterion Collection)

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This second feature by Ousmane Sembene 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 Sembene'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.