Touki Bouki

Mory and Anta are a young couple on the Senegalese coast, skint and dreaming of Europe. They cruise dusty roads on a moped, with Josephine Baker’s ‘Paris’ a faithful soundtrack to their escape fantasies. Making...

Dir. Djibril Diop Mambety Senegal 1973, 88 mins

Feat. Magaye Niang; Mareme Niang; Aminata Fall

Mory and Anta are a young couple on the Senegalese coast, skint and dreaming of Europe.  They cruise dusty roads on a moped, with Josephine Baker’s ‘Paris’ a faithful soundtrack to their escape fantasies.  Making his first feature, Mambety drew on his own sense of restlessness.  Soon afterwards he too would flee for France, and today young Africans continue to look across the water for answers.  It’s a familiar story, but what makes Touki Bouki so special is the way he tells it, mixing up new-wave trickery and ancient folklore.  Moments.  Crazy jump-cuts.  The way the sunlight hits a water-bucket.  The constant sound of waves, animals, radio-noise.  And amazing colours; yellow cranes, blue sea, red blood.

“One must have a mad belief that everything is possible--you have to be mad to the point of being irresponsible. Because I know that cinema must be reinvented, reinvented each time, and whoever ventures into cinema also has a share in its reinvention.” - Mambety

World Cinema Foundation