July, 2009 Hyenas

HYENAS 1992, USA, 96 min. SEE TRAILER!
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambety
Thursday, July 2, 7pm, General Admission $5.00
210 West 87th Street, Chicago, IL 60620

An old woman millionairess with a gold artificial leg and hand returns to her impoverished native village after several decades. Hearing she is wealthy beyond belief, the villagers prepare an elaborate array of pomp and circumstance in her honor to flatter her into using her money to revitalize their decaying, poverty-stricken lives. They regale her with ceremonial speeches, ritual dances, music, and praise songs. Knowing full well what they do, she makes an announcement.

But first, she dismisses the faulty memory of their praises. Secondly, she explains the circumstances that drove her out of the village and brought her back. The village shopkeeper had made her pregnant at the age of seventeen, suborned the perjury of witnesses to back up his denials, and she was branded by their mores, and, as a social outcast, became a prostitute, travelled the world, and became rich through prostitution. Her lover, now the storekeeper, had dumped her to marry for money, but he and his wife along with the rest of the village lives in squalor, too, since everybody “buys” everything on credit and never pays.

The old woman agrees to make the village and its people wealthy beyond their imagination. There is one condition: the storekeeper, the man who betrayed her, must first be killed. The people in the village are outraged at this condition. “We are still Africans. We are civilized people. We won’t kill for money.” But then, poverty and greed prove top be their undoing in the face of all her gifts and promises of great wealth.

“This pungent film adaptation’s change of locale lends the tale a new political dimension…(Mambety) inflects the grim drama with an edge of carnival humor. This film carries a sting!”
New York Times