Le franc + The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun

Introduction by Mati Diop

The great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, who is best known for 1971’s epochal Touki Bouki—and whose legacy can be felt in this year’s NYFF, with his niece Mati Diop’s masterful, Cannes-awarded Atlantics in the Main Slate—made two wonderful medium-length films in the nineties that were intended to be part of a trilogy titled “Tales of Ordinary People,” but the filmmaker died in 1998 before he could finish. In Le franc, a broke musician comes upon a lottery ticket after his beloved instrument is confiscated by his landlady; in the posthumously released The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, a young girl decides to sell newspapers on the streets, despite the fact that boys have historically run that racket. The two films function beautifully as a pair of magical realist works grounded in the political realities of Dakar. Restored in 2K in 2019 by Waka Films with the support of the Institut Français, Cinémathèque Afrique and CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, in agreement with Teemur Mambéty, at Éclair Laboratories from the original negative.