Hyenas

Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1992 Senegalese film adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit. Linguère Ramatou, forced out of the town of Colobane years earlier, is now among the richest women in the world, and she returns. She makes the townspeople an offer: enough money to lift them out of poverty, in exchange for the death of the man who got her pregnant and abandoned her when she was young. The town refuses at first, then starts shopping, taking on debt, buying new things, and the decision makes itself by degrees. Mambéty builds this as both a revenge story and an allegory of how postcolonial Africa was taken over by debt and consumption. It reached the competition at Cannes and was the director's second and final feature. Who it's for: viewers who like African cinema and political allegory. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a fast-moving story; the film proceeds at a heavy, ceremonial pace.