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Mandabi

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France, Senegal · 1968
1h 30m
Director Ousmane Sembène
Starring Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N'Diaye, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture
Genre Comedy, Drama

An unemployed Senegalese Muslim, Ibrahima, lives with his two wives and seven children in Dakar. When his nephew sends him a money order worth 25,000 francs, from working as a street sweeper in Paris, Ibrahima faces endless obstacles trying to obtain the money order, forced through the levels of Senegalese bureaucracy.

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What are critics saying?

100

Film of the Week by Guy Lodge

Swaggers with a keen awareness of street-level economy and survival, hard on the game and wryly empathetic toward the players.

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This is gentle, walking-pace cinema that leads us by the hand from vignette to vignette, from scene to scene, presented to us with ingenuous simplicity and calm.

90

The New Yorker by Richard Brody

Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles-with the authorities and with one another-distract them from political revolt.

80

Irish Times by Tara Brady

Mandabi's playful grammar and arresting camerawork are as exciting and politically charged as anything that emerged from the contemporaneous Nouvelle Vague.

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