Harvard Film Archive: "Touki Bouki" | Djibril Diop Mambéty

Date: 

Monday, February 9, 2015, 7:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA

Free Admission with Harvard ID
Introduction by Mati Diop

Monday February 9 at 7pm

Touki bouki

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, Aminata Fall
Senegal 1973, 35mm, color, 89 min

The debut feature of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, Touki bouki stands today as one of the classics of African cinema and of 1970s world cinema. Built out of a rich montage of sights and sounds, Touki bouki is exuberantly syncretic, mixing the contemporary and the traditional, the naturalistic and the modernist in an expression of post-colonial Senegal’s ambitions for the future. This syncretism is embodied onscreen by the relationship between its two protagonists: a charismatic cowboy-turned-biker and a young student who meet in Dakar and dream of going to Europe.