Week 8 Screening: Touki Bouki (1973)

Na nga def, all! We hope you had a great mid-sem break and managed to watch some cool movies in it. Speaking of cool movies (we always are), this week we'll be watching one of the famed, seminal works of African cinema, Djibril Diop Mambéty's picaresque, postcolonial, magical realist, Senegalese drama full of fantasies: Touki Bouki!

When: 3:00pm, Friday May 2
Where: Interactive Cinema Space, Room 353, Arts West - North Wing (Building 148a)
Free: PIZZA and DRINKS before the film! 🍕🥤

In the film (the Wolof title of which means Journey of the Hyena), Mory, a cowherd who rides a motorcycle mounted with a cow's skull, and Anta, a university student, meet up in Dakar, Senegal's capital. Alienated and disaffected with life in the country post-independence, they dream of escaping to a romanticised Paris, and so work up different schemes to raise money for the journey.

Popping in colour and avant-garde in construction, with a surreal mix of reality and fantasy reflecting a hybridised world of the traditional and the modern, Mambéty presents a story about the yearning of youth, and mischief induced by both poverty and a more general malaise. Though not received favourably at home upon its initial release, Touki Bouki won the International Critics Award at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, and has gained further acclaim in Senegal and abroad in the years since. Not bad for a film made on a budget of just $30,000.

Content warning: scenes of animals being slaughtered are featured. If you have any questions or concerns, send us an email.

After the movie, we'll head to the pub for discussion and drinks as usual. 🍻

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guexLrL44t0