Hyenas
Comedies
•
1h 50m
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit. In Mambéty’s imagining, the story follows a now-rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a modern-day Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by Western materialism. A Metrograph Pictures release.
Up Next in Comedies
-
La Chinoise
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a... -
L for Leisure
Leaving May 1
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 73 mins | 2014
Only ’90s kids will remember: in this affectionate but ironic throwback, structured as a series of piquant, deadpan vignettes, grad students on vacation lounge and mull over matters both petty and metaphysical. Captured on sp... -
Murdering the Devil
Leaving May 1
Directed by Ester Krumbachová | 75 mins | 1970
The lone directorial effort of Ester Krumbachová, better known as a scriptwriter ("Daisies", "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders") and costume designer, is a barbed, blissfully bizarre feminist satire released amidst the flowering of poli...
