This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema.

There is hardly any better way to enter the world of Djibril Diop Mambéty than through Contras’ City, his 1968 manifesto-like city symphony classic. In it, he literally offers the theory of his cinema and his theory of cinema: “The cinema is the art of making the contingent necessary, essential, inescapable, incontrovertible.” Indeed, Roland Barthes would have defined it as “The Cinema of the Punctum”, discernible primarily through the casting of the irreverent, playful and poetic gaze on the real.
Contras’ City is cast as an impressionistic and dialogical tour of Dakar, Senegal’s metropolis, in which Mambéty paints the contradictorily plural identities of his city through its arch tecture ([neo]classical colonial European through Islamic), hints at its politics caught between legacies of colonialism, reigning neocolonialism, and aspirations to emancipated subjecthood, reveals its cultures shaped by the forces of Negritude, Christianity, Islam and modern, secular and cosmopolitan worldliness. Like Dakar, the film is a tour de force, which carries multiple identity papers, partaking at once in registers of the poetic, the observational, the reflexive, the ironic/humorous/comedic, the interactive, the subjective, the class-conscious, in short, the essayistic.

Aboubakar Sanogo