In it’s fourth year, Black World Cinema is a showcase of seldom seen classic features and new films from around the world. Black World Cinema presents films by filmmakers that bring us story with compelling content and human dimension seldom presented in mainstream cinema.
All screenings are followed by lively discussions moderated by program director (and Black Box Office contributor) Floyd Webb or local filmwriters and directors.
July’s film is from the legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty (January 1945 – July 23, 1998).
Mambéty was more than just a filmmaker. An actor, orator, poet and compser! He was known for making a small number of films with an original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style. one of the great ones is being shown at Chicago’s Black World Cinema. If you don’t know about this, it’s worth taking the time to check it!
Thursday, July 2, 7pm.
General Admission $5.00
210 West 87th Street, Chicago, IL 60620
About the film:
An old woman millionairess with a gold artificial leg and hand returns to her impoverished native village after several decades. Hearing she is wealthy beyond belief, the villagers prepare an elaborate array of pomp and circumstance in her honor to flatter her into using her money to revitalize their decaying, poverty-stricken lives. They regale her with ceremonial speeches, ritual dances, music, and praise songs. Knowing full well what they do, she makes an announcement.
But first, she dismisses the faulty memory of their praises. Secondly, she explains the circumstances that drove her out of the village and brought her back. The village shopkeeper had made her pregnant at the age of seventeen, suborned the perjury of witnesses to back up his denials, and she was branded by their mores, and, as a social outcast, became a prostitute, travelled the world, and became rich through prostitution. Her lover, now the storekeeper, had dumped her to marry for money, but he and his wife along with the rest of the village lives in squalor, too, since everybody “buys” everything on credit and never pays.
The old woman agrees to make the village and its people wealthy beyond their imagination. There is one condition: the storekeeper, the man who betrayed her, must first be killed. The people in the village are outraged at this condition. “We are still Africans. We are civilized people. We won’t kill for money.” But then, poverty and greed prove top be their undoing in the face of all her gifts and promises of great wealth.
“A timeless story…The strong story line and fine ensemble acting provide a faster, more easily assimilated rhythm than many African films.”
Variety“This pungent film adaptation’s change of locale lends the tale a new political dimension…(Mambety) inflects the grim drama with an edge of carnival humor. This film carries a sting!”
New York Times“This wicked tale, told with wit and irony, has all the ingredients of a crowd-pleaser.”
The Village Voice“Funnier and warmer than Durrenmatt ever dared to be but with the tale’s bleak, ominous edges still in evidence.”
New York Newsday
“Mambety has given us very strong images of neo-colonial relations in Africa. But the images go beyond Africa to the moral decay at the heart of consumer capitalism.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’O
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