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

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.

Less than two years after his debut short film, Djibril Diop Mambéty returns to the streets of Dakar. He employs the same sarcastic tone by staging a Sub-Saharan game of cops and robbers with a Chaplinesque flair: “This somewhat immoral street urchin – revealed to be Mambéty – reminds me very much of myself.” Unlike a previous shorter, black-and-white version shot when he was twenty, here Djbril paints his story with saturated and sumptuous colours, which from now on will characterise his explosive and visionary signature style.

It takes only few minutes into Badou Boy to grasp the extent of Mambéty’s talent. At his second film it seems quite clear that Djbril – the extraterrestrial, the anarchist, the poet, the “most beautiful comet of the new African cinema” – already had a very unique and personal idea of film. The opening credits, punctuated by Lato Dramé’s hypnotic music, show him between takes, directing the crew, unveiling the trick behind the illusion even before his story begins. “I make films to lie and trick others,” he told French newspaper “Libération”, “to reveal the truth through illusion.”
Truth is in the streets of Kolobane, in Senegal, where the newly, long awaited independence is already giving ways to corruption and neo-colonisation; in the lopsided walk of the drunk and the homeless, in the griots’ prophecies, in the open-air sewers and in the tin huts, and in the proud, imperishable vitality of the common people.
In Mambéty’s childhood, illusion was always synonymous with cinema. From his love for shadow theatres to his habit of overhearing entire films outside a cinema – Egyptian melodramas, westerns, Indian musicals – a mixture of voices, noises, idioms and music from which to imagine a new story.
Sound exploration and experimentation are among the most personal and original elements of Mambéty’s cinema. In Badou Boy, he exploits the limitations imposed by technology to create a soundtrack that is often in conflict with the images. An acoustic space that develops a second narrative, with extraordinarily comic and surreal effects.

Cecilia Cenciarelli