Street Musician

It's an enormous pity that Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety died last summer while making The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, because the films he did manage to make seemed to promise a long, unpredictable career. Thanks to this tribute during the San Francisco International Film Festival, you'll get a chance to see five of Mambety's rarely screened films.

The 1969 short Contras' City takes us on a tour of Dakar as a sly narrator comments on everything on the streets, from outdoor haircutters and tailors to the country youth brooding over their urban fate. Badou Boy (1970) follows the crooked path of a street urchin on the lam from a bowlegged cop who may be too round to give chase on his bicycle, which he walks everywhere. The cops, along with all authority figures (not to mention blind musicians, rich gays, and angry women) in Mambety's films, are ripe for ridicule, but when they eventually catch up with the director's footloose anti-heroes their violence is nothing to laugh at.

Similarly, the slapstick antics of some fez-wearing gentlemen and Mambety's own mincing, Chaplin-esque characterization of a gay man may leave you scratching your head rather than laughing out loud as a pair of young lovers in the cross-cut-crazy, New Wave-ish Touki Bouki (1973) employ outrageous measures (like plotting to steal funds intended for a Charles de Gaulle memorial and ripping off said homosexual) and a big dose of fantasy to board a ship for Paris. You may have to avert your eyes during the heavy-handed livestock-slaughter "metaphors."

Mambety's final two works, meant to be the first and second in a trilogy, Le Franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999), are both richly textured and vibrantly musical fables of life in Senegal. The Little Girl of the title, toughened and forced to stand up for herself, uses everything she has -- including her natural imperiousness and her spindly crutches -- to carve out her own territory in the cruel, all-boy world of newspaper vending. The inventive, exploratory use of Senegalese music is a great pleasure in all of Mambety's films.

-- Frako Loden

Badou Boy (with Contras' City): Sunday, May 2, 5:30 p.m., PFA; Monday, May 3, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tuesday, May 4, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

Touki Bouki: Sunday, April 25, 2 p.m., Kabuki
Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun: Saturday, May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tuesday, May 4, 7:20 p.m., Kabuki; Wednesday, May 5, 1 p.m., Kabuki