Touki Bouki

Touki Bouki

Film Retrospective 2018–19: Nouvelle Vague, Revisited

Tuesday, December 11 at 6:30 p.m.
$7 Members / $10 Non-Members / Includes a glass of French wine
54 W. Chicago Avenue

Touki Bouki by Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal,1973, 89 min.)

With Juelle Daley, Center for Black Diaspora, DePaul University

Senegalese Director Djibril Diop Mambety had never attempted a feature-length film before making Touki Bouki when he was only twenty-eight - a boldness reminiscent of the Nouvelle Vague upstarts from a decade earlier, whose dynamic, counter-cultural influence on the film is evident.

In Dakar, cowherd Mory (Magaye Niang) and his girlfriend Anta (Mareme Niang) drive around on Mory’s motorcycle fitted with a bull’s skull, and hatch a plan to escape their arduous existence by fleeing to gay Paris. The two indulge in colorful fantasies of their future wealth, which contrast starkly with unpleasant episodes - the uncensored slaughter of a steer, or the kidnapping of Mory by a group of student activists, for instance. With all that happening, who wouldn’t want to get lost in daydreams now and then? 
 
 
Mambéty only made two films, before dying at an early age of lung cancer. Touki Bouki, however, has been heralded as one of the best films ever to emerge from Africa. 
 
“Although Touki bouki has been compared to such outlaw-couple movies as Pierrot le fou (1965) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the bare-bones plot (...) is merely the departure point for a jaundiced look at Senegalese modernity and its discontents.” -Richard Porton, The Criterion Collection
 
Please note : Wine service at 6:00 p.m., program starts at 6:30 p.m.

Juelle Daley is an avid lover of photography and regular consumer of independent and international films. She is currently the Assistant Director at the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University. She maintains a deep attachment to the art and culture of both France and China after both her undergraduate and graduate studies. She was also French-trained in the area of European Urban History, Planning and Architecture while residing in France for an extended period of time. These days, she shifted her creative focus to filmmaking and is currently a MFA candidate in directing at DePaul’s School of Cinematic Arts where she is working on her final thesis film.

Restored in 2008 by Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

Film Retrospective 2018-2019

Nouvelle Vague, Revisited

Vintage cars and jazz music; love stories in black and white; reckless youth, smoke and style, so much style … Our new film series is all about the French New Wave with the films you know and love shown on Saturday afternoons, and weeknight screenings dedicated to the New Wave’s influence around the world and across generations—in the presence of our guest speakers.

Are you ready to be swept away? Here comes La Nouvelle Vague again!

 

Series curated by Aimée Laberge, and co-curated by Bailey Holtz and Randy Williams