Tales of Ordinary People
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Tthese two now classic shorts, Le Franc (1994) and La petite vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl who Sold the Sun, 1999) by the iconoclastic Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, were originally intended as a trilogy under the title, Tales of Ordinary People. Mambety’s untimely death in 1998 prevented the completion of the third film.
Mambety had a genius for constructing allegories or fables that represent abstract economic concepts through everyday human dramas. Newsweek commented that Mambety’s work is “rich with symbolism and spirituality” which uses film to project a vital image of his native continent.
In the first film, Le Franc, Mambety uses the French government's sudden 50
"A wondrous affirmative political allegory and an exercise in stylized neo-realism. One of the top ten of the year."
Village Voice
"The humanity Mambety shows is so piercingly and immediately moving in its angelic matter-of-factnesss, its holy and surreal."
San Francisco Chronicle
Tales of Ordinary People