January 17

Hyenas
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 113 minutes, 1992, Senegal
( in Wolof with English subtitles)
    An old woman, Linguère Ramatou, returns to Colobane, the decaying village where she was born, now that she has become the richest woman in the world. She seeks revenge against Dramaan Drameh, the lover of her youth who betrayed her, forcing her out of the village and into a life of prostitution. She offers the villagers a trillion dollars if they will execute Dramaan. At first outraged, they easily become addicted to the pleasures of the consumer society. In the end, they literally consume Dramaan, leaving behind only his tattered clothes, like hyenas.

Faat Kine
Ousmane Sembène, 121 minutes, 2000, Senegal
(in French and Wolof with English subtitles)
    Faat Kine is an independent single mother and successful businesswoman who runs a gasoline franchise. As she reflects back on her life, that of her mother and the future of her daughter, we recognize the difficulties facing women, the attitudes and institutions that have constrained them, as well as the possibility for change emanating from today’s youth.

W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices
Louis Massiah, 116 minutes, 1995
    This is the first film biography of a man who towered over African American history for nearly a century, W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963). His remarkable career as a scholar-activist stretched from the end of Reconstruction to the imposition of Jim Crow, its eventual defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the successful independence struggles of African nations. In this film, four prominent African American writers, Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka each narrates a period of his life and describes his impact on their work.

Family Across the Sea
Tim Carrier, 56 minutes, 1991
    Family across the Sea shows how scholars have uncovered the remarkable connections between the Gullah people of South Carolina and the people of Sierra Leone. It portrays how African Americans have preserved their ties with their homeland through centuries of oppression.
The Language You Cry In
Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano, 52 minutes, 1998, Sierra Leone/Spain
(in English and Mende with English subtitles)
    The Language You Cry In tells an amazing scholarly detective story reaching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles from 18th century Sierra Leone to the Gullah people of present-day Georgia. It traces the history of a burial hymn of the Mende people brought by slaves to the rice plantations of the southeast coast of the U.S. more than two hundred years ago.

Lumumba
A Zeitgeist Films Release, 115 minutes, 2000, France/Belgium/Haiti/Germany
(in French with English subtitles)
    Lumumba is a gripping political thriller that tells the story of the legendary African leader Patrice Emery Lumumba. Called “the politico of the bush” by journalists of his day, the brilliant and charismatic Lumumba rose rapidly to the office of Prime Minister when Belgium conceded the Congo’s independence in June, 1960. Lumumba’s vision of a united Africa gained him powerful enemies: the Belgian authorities, who wanted a much more paternal role in their former colony’s affairs, and the CIA, who supported Lumumba’s former friend Joseph Mobutu in order to protect U.S. business interests in Congo’s vast resources and their upper hand in the Cold War power balance. The architects behind Lumumba’s brutal death in 1961, a mere nine months after becoming the Country’s first Prime Minister, recently became known and are dramatized for the first time in Lumumba.

Touki Bouki (Journey of the Hyena)
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 85 minutes, 1973, Senegal
(in Wolof and French with English subtitles)
    Mory and Anta, two young Senegalese, are living a life of boredom and poverty. They have little or no connection with the older generations or their community. (She is a student! He was a cattle herder.) They decide to go to Paris ("Paris, Paris, Paris"), a fantasy-land where all will be made well and where they'll enjoy the luxuries of French (or Western) living. They try several schemes to obtain money. They succeed, finally, by stealing clothes from Charlie and money from one of his guests. They book passage to France. But Mory, at the last moment, cannot bear to go, and he runs (runs and runs) in a kind of panic to recover his motorcycle and the ox's skull and horns which connect him (as well as suggest how disconnected he is) to Senegal and its pastoral traditions. Anta is left on board the ship.

Guimba the Tyrant
Cheik Oumar Sissoko, 94 minutes, 1995, Mali
(in Bambara and Peul with English subtitles)
    Guimba, the film's anti-hero, tyrannizes a once prosperous trading city through arbitrary terror and the misuse of occult powers. When he demands that one of his nobles divorce his wife so his son, the dwarf Jangine, can marry her, the entire community finally turns against him.

Films screenings are at 7 pm in the Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue.
Admission is free and open to the public.