TSPDT

Key Production Country: Senegal
Key Genres: Drama, Rural Drama, Road Movie, Romantic Drama, Family Drama, Short Film
Key Collaborators: Aminata Fall (Leading Actress), Christoph Colomb (Leading Character Actor), Wasis Diop (Composer)

"Djibril Diop Mambéty was a Senegalese filmmaker, actor, orator, composer and poet. Despite his small oeuvre, he holds a legendary status within African Cinema. Besides being trained as an actor at the National Daniel Aorano Theatre in Dakar, he had no formal training in filmmaking. Diop Mambéty directed two short films before his first feature Touki Bouki (1973), for which he received the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes and the Special Jury Prize at Moscow Film Festival. It also gained him international acclaim for the unconventional cinematic technique and narrative style. Although more experimental than many of his African contemporaries, Diop Mambéty shared their use of the cinematic medium to comment on the political and social conditions in Africa." - International Film Festival Rotterdam

"The 19-year rupture that separated his only two feature films, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992), remains a mystery. Yet the clues to its solution may be all too ample in his remarkable, truncated life as a filmmaker. Mambéty died of lung cancer in a Paris hospital in 1998, before his last film, The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999), had been released. He was 53. His filmmaking falls inevitably into two periods, the Before and the After of the lengthy silence, that are closely linked by theme while radically separated by style. He launched his career in the wild cinematic and social upheavals of the late ’60s and restored it in the illusory stability of the early ’90s “New World Order,” with values and vision hardly altered over the intervening years." - Robert Sklar (Film Comment, 2000)

"Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki and Hyenas. Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of the story of the director’s enormous accomplishments in his too-brief life. Two masterpieces of the medium-length form (featurette or moyen métrage) that Mambéty completed in his final years provide us a fuller picture of the elements that define his small, but perfect, filmography—a rich social vision, sly humor, and formal ingenuity. Mambéty initially meant for these films to lead off a trilogy to be titled Tales of Ordinary People, but sadly lived only to complete Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun." - American Cinematheque (2023)

"Djibril Diop Mambéty has continued to show the world the qualities and the shortcomings of Senegalese society. The filmmaker seems to have been constantly driven by the desire to create his art with respect for African traditions, omnipresent in a staging of colorful, carnival-like characters, animated by dialogues crying out for truth. Dressed in visually strong costumes, they evolve within panoramas revealing both the beauty of Senegal and its character, both deeply natural and urban." - Montaine Dumont (DailyArt Magazine, 2022)

"Born in Colobane, a small town outside Dakar, Mambéty studied acting before teaching himself filmmaking. After turning heads in 1969 with the satirical short Contras’ City, Mambéty made his feature debut with Touki Bouki (1973), a psychedelic, supercharged homage to urban Senegal’s tricksters and dreamers… Unable to overcome the hurdles of film financing in Africa, Mambéty disappeared from feature filmmaking for nearly twenty years, finally returning in the 1990s with Hyenas and Le franc." - Jason Sanders (BAMPFA, 2022)

"I am interested in marginalized people, because I believe that they do more for the evolution of a community than the conformists. Marginalized people bring a community into contact with a wider world. The characters of Touki Bouki are interesting to me because their dreams are not those of ordinary people." - Djibril Diop Mambéty (Transition 78, 1999)