Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 2005
After an unsatisfactory attempt to make a film about the numerous mentally ill people who filled the streets of Dakar back in 1994, Sylla, in her own words “fell ill and crossed to the other side, seeing what others don’t see.” Now “li...

Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla | 63 mins | 2014
Begun by Sylla and completed by her sister, Mariama, after Khady’s death in 2013, "A Single Word" connects the essay film to the oral historical tradition of the griots—West African storytellers, musicians, and poets ...

Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 1999
Losing ground to more modern forms of transit today, the colorfully painted “car rapide” minibuses that criss-cross the crowded streets and avenues of Dakar at breakneck speed carrying passengers and merchandise have been icons of the ...

Directed by Rusty Cundieff | 88 mins | 1993
Overshadowed somewhat at the time of its release by another gangsta rap mockumentary send-up of the same year, the Chris Rock vehicle "CB4," Cundieff’s shoestring-budget feature debut gets just as many laughs at a fraction of the price, following sociol...

Directed by Bill Gunn | 113 mins | 1973
Cut by timid distributors and inappropriately marketed as grindhouse blaxploitation, this eerie, sui generis work by utterly iconoclastic director Bill Gunn ("Personal Problems") is, in its original form, nothing short of a masterpiece of ‘70s American cine...

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 Mam...

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1994
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

Directed by Perry Henzell | 89 mins | 2006
Perry Henzell’s follow-up to "The Harder They Come" (1972) very nearly never saw the light of day: funding dried up before its completion, and then the footage was lost. Rediscovered by chance in 2006 and restored in 2019—nearly half a century after the ...

Directed by Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden | 93 mins | 2024
A compassionate, convivial, and deeply humane improvised comedy from Moselle ("The Wolfpack", "Skate Kitchen") and co-director Harden, inspired by the latter’s own experiences, "The Black Sea" stars Harden—also providing original ...

Directed by Perry Henzell | 102 mins | 1972
Star Jimmy Cliff holds down both the screen and the soundtrack in this rude-boy cult classic, Jamaica’s first feature film, which draws on the legend of folk hero prison escapee Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin. Cliff plays Ivan, a bumpkin naif freshly arrived i...

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1999
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla | 45 mins | 2008
Khady Sylla’s docudrama inquiry into the lives—inner and exterior—of Dakar’s female domestics, which employs scenes of improvised street theater, direct-address freestyle screeds, candid interviews, and inner monologue musings with the...