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Release: August 6, 2024

$7.99

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Banel and Adama are fiercely in love. The young couple lives in a remote village in northern Senegal. For them, nothing else exists except each other. But for the rest of their tight-knit village, duty dictates that Adama soon accept the role of chief. The two lovers have other plans… until something in the air changes. The rains do not come; the cattle begin to die; the men leave. A rare debut feature that premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and Senegal’s official submission to the Academy Awards®, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama is a lush and lyrical fable that soars to the heights of longing and descends deep into the realm of myth, sending its protagonists’ idyllic love on a collision course with their community’s customs. Because in this world, there is no room for passion, let alone chaos. Special Features: • Q&A with director Ramata-Toulaye Sy (courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center) • Theatrical Trailer

Release: May 21, 2024

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Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms. THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and writer Amy Sall The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra New English subtitle translations PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price EMITAÏ 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. XALA An adaptation of Ousmane Sembène’s own 1973 novel, Xala is a hilarious, caustic satire of political corruption under an inept patriarchy. On the night of his wedding to his third bride, government official El Hadji (Thierno Leye) is rendered impotent and begins to suspect that one of his other wives has placed a curse on him. After seeking a cure from a local marabout, El Hadji must face the possibility that he deserves the infliction for his part in embezzling public funds and for helping to keep Senegal under French control. Adeptly combining elements of African folklore and popular cinema, Sembène indicts the hubris, entitlement, and opportunism of male authority figures. CEDDO 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.

Release: February 16, 2021

$7.99

Description

This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head. One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, Mandabi—an adaptation of a novella by the director himself—is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • Introduction by film scholar Aboubakar Sanogo • Conversation from 2020 with author and screenwriter Boubacar Boris Diop and sociologist and feminist activist Marie Angélique Savané • Praise Song, a new program about director Ousmane Sembène featuring outtakes from the 2015 documentary Sembène! of interviews with author and activist Angela Davis, musician Youssou N’Dour, filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara, and many others • Tauw, a 1970 short film by Sembène • New English subtitle translation by Sembène biographer Samba Gadjigo • PLUS: An essay by critic and scholar Tiana Reid and excerpts from a 1969 interview with Sembène