Hyenas
NYFF Favorites
•
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 NYFF Favorites
-
Jauja
Directed by Lisandro Alonso | 110 mins | 2014
Viggo Mortensen stars as a Danish engineer who joins the Argentine army at the very ends of the Earth in the 1800s. When his daughter elopes with a soldier, Mortensen’s mercenary heads into the harsh wilderness on a search, which director Alonso rende... -
Lady Vengeance
Leaving November 1
Directed by Park Chan Wook | 115 mins | 2005
The capper of Park’s “Revenge Trilogy” follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless mo... -
Mountains May Depart
Directed by Jia Zhangke | 126 mins | 2015
A simple love triangle between three young people living in Fenyang—Jia’s much-revisited and filmed hometown—lays the foundations for an epoch-spanning triptych, describing the past, present, and future of three characters (including leading lady Zhao Tao...
