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Djibril Diop Mambety: reinventing Africa
A retrospective entirely dedicated to the visionary poet from Black Africa. Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegalese filmmaker who passed away before his time, was able to show us a country pervaded by a symbolic and musical dimension, towards a daring, experimental cinema.
All of his works will be shown, 7 films which can be defined as ‘symphonies of life’. Images like projections of his inner universe: his home country, the people who animates the city of Dakar and its quarters, the sea as border and obsession, the wiry dancing bodies of the protagonists of his stories, voices and music, are some of the themes and distinctive features of his whole filmography. His research is a formal one, where the aesthetic value of every single image is essential. A research of poetry, that has to be found in everyday life, in the real that merges with the vehemence of imagination and dream, but always including myths and symbols of the African tradition as well. His vision of reality is not univocal: it contemplates different possibilities, afterthoughts, tangles and symbolic references.
Since his very first work, the short film “Contras’ city”, he focuses on the city of Dakar, on its contrasts and its different social and cultural realities. With “Badou boy” he explores the spirit of rebellion, the protest against predetermined rules and order. It’s the story of a pickpocket who lives day by day, bringing back on the screen some part of the director’s youth – and perhaps the one of many other young Africans. With “Le franc” and “La petite vendeuse de soleil”, he finds the protagonists of his stories among regular people walking the streets – he actually wanted to dedicate a trilogy to this subject, left undone because of his premature death. In the recurrent images of the broad expanse of the ocean, which we find in all his films (especially in his masterpiece “Touki Bouki”), we find the obsession to leave, the dream of a better life elsewhere, the sense of freedom and rebellion of young African people. He depicts his passion for people and their stories, his great respect for the elderly with his short documentary “Parlons grand-mère”, which pays homage not only to the actress Fatimata Sango, but also to the art of making cinema. With “Heynes”, a bitter tale based on the theatre piece “The visit of the old lady” by the Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt, he faces the subject of the desecrating, corrupting power of money, which brings an entire village to surrender to a blackmail which will be fatal.
“Everyone has his own personal way to accomplish his mission. I don’t believe in didactic cinema, but I strongly believe in creation. I think our duty as directors is aggression. If we want to change something, we must ‘attack’ the audience, irritate them, make them uncomfortable, without hoping for an immediate, tangible success.”
His training was theatrical: for several years, he worked for the company of the National Theater Daniel Sorano in Dakar. But then he devoted himself to cinema, as a self-taught director, because he really wanted to take part in that stylistic revolution and re-invention of cinema which was going on all around the world, with the European nouvelle vague, the English freecinema, the Latin American cinema novo.
The retrospective is organized in collaboration with Lab80, COE- Centro Orientamento Educativo, Festival del Cinema Africano, d’Asia e America Latina of Milan.
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