Senegal

In a rural African village poised at the outer edge of the modern world, a teenage girl hatches a secret plan to rescue her 11-year-old sister from an arranged marriage.Read More »

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Set in a small African village, four young girls face a ritual “purification” flee to the household of Colle’ Ardo Gallo Sy, a strong-willed woman who has managed to shield her own teenage daughter from mutilation.
Colle’ invokes the time-honored custom of moolaade (sanctuary) to protect the fugitives, and tension mounts as the ensuing stand-off pits Colle’ against a village traditionalists (both male and female) and endangers the prospective marriage of her daughter to the heir-apparent to the tribal throne.Read More »

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In a village outside Dakar, the gods – or the stars, or destiny, have spoken: Satché must die by the end of the day. Directed by Alain Gomis and starring multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams, “Tey” is a beautiful, sensual, humane tale with beautiful scenes that seek to show the elements of friendship, desire, sadness, affection and anger that are usually left unsaid.Read More »

Fad,Jal is a Serere Senegalese village. At school, children learn, in French, the grammar and history of France. Villagers practice their religion in a church, a vestige of colonialism. At the foot of a tree, the ancestor and a griot tell in Wolof the history of the village to the children, its creation, its customs, its traditions. This is an opportunity to discover the crafts, agricultural techniques and the difficulty of exploiting the land because of the drought. In parallel, the daily Serere is confronted to the governmental policy which appropriates from now on the lands, previously transmitted orally between the villagers.Read More »

After winning a scholarship to study in France, a young Senegalese man returns home and questions his experience and his future, with honesty, courage and humour. — MUBIRead More »

This Senegalese melodrama tells the story of a young girl called Mossane who lives in a village between the ocean and the savannah. There, veneration for the traditions is very common. There’s a legend saying that every other century a girl is born who is doomed because of her beauty. Mossane is only fourteen years old but is already considered to be extraordinary beautiful. Even her own brother is in love with her. According to the custom she has been promised to a rather wealthy man called Diogoye since the day of her birth. However, Mossane is in love with the poor student Fara who is forced to return to the village while the university is on strike. Torn between her own dreams and traditions, Mossane decides to escape. The film shows the resistance of the young generation and is dedicated especially to the African women, their courage and their wish for emancipation.Read More »

A young couple in Senegal must contend with the disapproval of their remote village.Read More »

In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.Read More »

With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe’s patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army’s wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.Read More »