Early Ousmane Sembène Film Series: Mandabi / Tauw

Mandabi (Ousmane Sembène, 1968, DCP, 92 mins)
Tauw (Ousmane Sembène, 1970, 16mm, 24 mins)

Beset by family expectations and modern bureaucratic nightmares, young Tauw looks for work and older Ibrahima tries to cash a life-changing money order. Mandabi “swaggers with a keen awareness of street-level economy and survival, hard on the game and wryly empathetic toward the players” (Guy Lodge). In Wolof and French with English subtitles. DCP from Janus Films, 16mm print from the Yale Film Archive.

The series “Early Ousmane Sembène: The First Films from the Father of African Cinema” is presented by the Yale Film Archive and the Whitney Humanities Center in celebration of the centenary of Sembène’s birth.