Mambety for the people

Between true life and cinema,” said the late Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety, “there is only one step.” Then he added, wryly, “As for me, I’m not sure in which direction that step must be taken.”

There seems little that is uncertain, however, about his last film, The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun. And, despite the fact that the little girl in question is a cripple, the steps she takes towards self-sufficiency are unfaltering. In this simple tale, a 12-year-old takes her destiny into her own hands by contracting to sell Le Soleil (The Sun), a Dakar newspaper. Facing down the local bully-boys who would like to keep her out of their domain, she keeps going with exemplary determination.

Perhaps this story is in some ways a metaphor for the travails faced by African filmmakers such as Mambety. They have never had it easy, even when the late ruler of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, decided to put much of his country’s cash resources into filmmaking and promotion, founding the Festival of Pan-African Cinema, which takes place in Ouagadougou every second year.

There was a gap of nearly 20 years between Mambety’s only two full-length features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992); in that time, Mambety made only two short documentaries. The reasons for his long silence are unclear, but probably have something to do with his own individualistic nature (he was expelled from Senegal’s national theatre, where he worked as an actor, for lack of discipline). That and the fact that within the confines of a frequently state-funded African cinema his vision was a highly idiosyncratic one — he was surrealist of sorts who scorned the social realism of, say, his countryman Sembene Ousmane.

The difficulties of financing his films possibly informed Mambety’s jaundiced view of money, which permeates Hyenas (the dark tale of a rich woman who uses her fortune to force a whole town to take revenge on the man who jilted her) and his last films, Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun.

Le Franc is the physically comic tale of an impecunious man who buys a lottery ticket and has a lot of trouble claiming on it. In The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun, there is the girl’s struggle to earn a living — and the headlines of the papers she sells, which yell of the travails of the West African franc.

These two 45-minute movies are part of a projected trilogy (Tales of Little People) that Mambety had not completed by the time of his death. They are being shown in South Africa, alongside the two features, by the Film Resource Unit (FRU), at both art-movie centres and in outlying areas by the travelling Video Education Project.

FRU has an extraordinary library of African movies of many different kinds, from features to educational material. Their video distribution system reaches corporates as well as township spaza shops. Mambety would approve — at the première of the Mambety programme, speaker Mandla Langa told of how, at a Harare film festival, Mambety ignored the high-profile discussions and personally took his movies to Mbare township.

Along with Ster-Kinekor, FRU deserves accolades for getting Mambety’s works to the people. “If it is a capacity to show life in the cinema,” said Mambety, “I do not scorn that capacity. But it is a capacity that belongs to the wind.”