Mandabi

In Dakar, Ibrahima Dieng lives with two wives and seven children, unemployed and in debt. A money order arrives from his nephew, who sweeps streets in Paris: twenty five thousand francs. To collect it he needs an identity card. For the identity card he needs a birth certificate. For the birth certificate he needs to know his date of birth, and he does not. Word of the money order goes round the neighbourhood and everyone comes to the door. Ousmane Sembène writes and directs, from his own novella. Its historical place is large: it is regarded as the first feature shot in an African language, in Wolof. Sembène had made his earlier films in French and changed that deliberately, arguing that his audience should be watching films in its own language. The subject is bureaucracy and the film builds it as comedy. At every counter Dieng is asked for another document and every document depends on another; the target is the administrative structure inherited from colonialism, still operating identically after independence. The second target is solidarity. The neighbourhood does not help Dieng, it asks for a share. Sembène shows this without accusation and describes how poverty sets people against each other. Who it is for: viewers who want the founding films of African cinema and satire of bureaucracy. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the acting is not professional, and the film ends offering no solution.