Sembène 100: Three New Restorations

During World War II, French forces and their lackeys comb the countryside, conscripting young men and attempting to seize rice for their soldiers, a crop used by villagers for funeral rites rather than food. With unflinching realism, Sembène explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.

In Dakar, a French delegation is shown the door and local government officials claim autonomy — but is some light embezzlement and a backdoor deal with the French to blame for El Hadji’s newfound impotence on the night he’s to be wed to a third bride? Sembène’s satire of an inept patriarchy lopes along to the breezy sounds of the wedding band until truth exacts its retribution.

Banned in Senegal upon its original release, CEDDO is an ambitious, multilayered historical epic that explores the combustible interstices between a pre-colonial village’s Muslim majority and its outsiders, followers of an Indigenous religion who act upon the suspicion that they’re being targeted for religious conversion.