In collaboration with the curator and film scholar Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Portikus continues its African Cinema Series with the virtually complete oeuvre of Djibril Diop Mambety, one of the most idiosyncratic figures in cinema between the 1960s and the 1990s.

On three consecutive nights, Portikus screens the works of the filmmaker, storyteller, poet, composer, and actor Djibril Diop Mambety. Mambety made a relatively small number of films known only to small circles of connoisseurs in Senegal and abroad. Critics have praised his radical and experimental technique as well as the surreally fractured visual language of his films, which are driven forward by the soundtrack. The emergence of Mambety’s novel urban style with its undertones of subversion coincides with the radical impulses of the cinema of the 1960s. His films integrate a wide range of influences from movies, the theater, visual art, and music that enrich the complexity, artistic sophistication, and sense of humor as well as pathos of his work. Mambety worked closely with his brother, the musician and composer Wasis Diop, a prolific author of movie scores who wrote the music for Mambety’s films Hyènes and La petite vendeuse du Soleil as well as the remake The Thomas Crown Affair. The explosive energy of Mambety’s films echoes in the debut film by Mati Diop, the niece of the filmmaker, who died in Paris in 1998. Her Mille Soleils (2013) pays tribute to Mambety’s best-known film, Touki Bouki—part exploration of the original’s genesis, part sequel, it sketches the outlines of a future new avant-garde cinema.

For further information about the film program click here.

Brought to you by vagabonding reel to real in cooperation with Portikus. With funding support from Hessische Filmförderung.

AFRICAN CINEMA SERIES III
13 – 15 November, 2014
Daily from 7pm

free admission
Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt/Main

Tel: +49 69 962 4454 – 0
Fax: +49 69 962 4454 – 24

www.portikus.de