Directed, written and produced by the legendary, ‘father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène, the film was originally made in 1968 where it won the Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival. 

The second feature by Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realisation of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. One of his most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, Mandabi—an adaptation of a novella by the director himself—is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty

After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head.