Le Franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999)

DIRECTED BY DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY/FRENCH-SENEGALESE/1994; 1999

BLU-RAY STREET DATE: MARCH 26, 2024/KINO LORBER

In the video clip below, I offer my response to two African films from the 1990s, the first two parts of a planned trilogy that was never completed due to the death of the director. Djibril Diop Mambéty was among the first generation of African filmmakers to be recognized, respected, and celebrated by Western film critics and cinephiles. Touki Bouki, the film he’s most known for, was released in 1973 and published on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection as part of its World Cinema Project box set series and also available as a standalone disc.

Equally influenced by Mambéty’s engagement with the work of Jean-Luc Godard and observations of his local Senegalese environment, Touki Bouki remains a uniquely compelling feature focused on youthful rebels making a run to escape from the limitations of their poverty-stricken lot in life. The film set Mambéty on a path that led to him becoming a powerful artistic voice and innovator in world culture. 

Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun were released five years apart and were the last two films that he made. Each running around 45 minutes, they pair up nicely to provide a revealing insight into the everyday struggles faced and occasionally overcome by residents of Dakar, a coastal port city and the capital of Senegal. Their focus is clearly on the less affluent among them, many of them adolescents left to largely fend for themselves on the streets of an African metropolis.

Both films offer moments of heartfelt pathos, subversive and often slapstick-style humor, and moments of visual flourishes in the camerawork and editing that reveal Mambéty’s unique style. Now they’re more widely available for North American audiences to enjoy in this new release from Kino Lorber, using a beautiful 2K transfer from 2019. I highly recommend this disc to fans of the director or anyone seeking to build a home video collection of essential African or world cinema films. For the curious, these titles are also available to rent on the KinoNow streaming service (soon to be known as the “Kino Film Collection”). 

This video is the first of a five-part series focusing on recent home video releases of international films by Kino Lorber.  Please note that due to WordPress restrictions, we’ve had to mute the music within the film’s trailer, which shows between 07:09 and 07:33. You can view the unaltered version here, at David’s own channel.

Blu-ray Special Features:

  • Audio commentaries for The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun and Le Franc by film scholar Boukary Sawadogo, Ph.D.
  • Cinema is Magic (2022, a documentary about Djibril Diop Mambéty by Silvia Voser)
  • Preview Trailer