DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY: Djibril Diop Mambéty
PRODUCTION CO: Waka Films, Maag Daan
PHOTOGRAPHY: Jacques Besse
EDITOR: Sarah Taouss-Matton
MUSIC: Wasis Diop
WITH: Lissa Balera (Sili), Dieynaba Laam (Grandmother), Tayerou M'Baye (Babou Seck), Martin N'Gom (Gang Leader), Oumou Samb Crazy Woman)
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FESTIVALS: Berlin, Toronto

REVIEWS

“Mambéty’s final film is brimming with colour and optimism, carried through by a central character blessed with ferocious resilience and executed with a glorious eye for detail… The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun is an essential classic of world cinema.”

​– James Hanton, Outtakes

​“​An extraordinary twelve-year-old actor, Lissa Baléra, stars in the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety’s final film, from 1999. Baléra plays Sili Laam, a girl from a shantytown outside Dakar who, despite a disability that requires her to use crutches, travels to the city and becomes an itinerant newspaper vender (the only female one there); she’s so successful that she incurs the resentment — and the violence — of her young male competitors, whom she faces down with courage and resilience. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernizing capital. With fable-like lyricism, he contrasts the bitter competition among the poor with exemplary acts of audacious solidarity — and shows the vital public culture that arises spontaneously from the struggles of street people. The movie is a virtual musical, featuring religious chants from a teacher of Islam, and songs that stream from a boom box in the lap of a wheelchair-bound amputee give rise to a street dance, led by Sili, that blends fantasy and practicality with joyful wonder.”

— Richard Brody, New Yorker

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Dunedin     
Wednesday, 02 August, 7.30pm

Palmerston North     
Wednesday, 09 August, 6.00pm

Tauranga
Tuesday, 29 August, 6.00pm​

Canterbury
Monday, 11 September, 7.00pm

Nelson
Tuesday, 19 September, 6.00pm

Hamilton     
Monday, 02 October, 6.30pm

Whanganui     
Monday, 09 October, 7.00pm

​Wellington
Monday, 16 October, 6.15pm

​New Plymouth
Wednesday, 25 October, 6.00pm​

MORE AFRICAN CINEMA >>
African Cinema is presented in
​co-operation with the Institut Français and the Embassy of France