Past Film/Video | Classics

Hyenas

(Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992)

Introduced by Rooney Elmi

Still from Hyenas

The Wexner Center is proud to host the opening night of the third-annual Columbus Black International Film Festival! Celebrate before this screening of Hyenas at a special reception with cash bar and complimentary snacks in the Wex’s lower lobby at 6 PM. A free screening of 1990s gems Anemone Me and Oreos with Attitude starts at 5 PM.

A treasure of African cinema, Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas is a hallucinatory, comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit. In Mambéty’s version, a now-rich woman returns to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the townspeople: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who abandoned her years earlier and left her with his child. As the title indicates, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal, whose once-lofty postcolonial dreams have been eroded by western materialism. (110 mins., DCP) Columbus-based critic and curator Rooney Elmi, publisher of the feminist film magazine SVLLY(wood), introduces the screening.

Columbus Black International Film Festival continues through August 25. Visit columbusbiff.com for more about the festival and a complete schedule.

Still from Hyenas

Hyenas, image courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

Still from Hyenas

Hyenas, image courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

Still from Hyenas

Hyenas, image courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

Still from Hyenas

Hyenas, image courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

Restored by Thelma Film AG with the support of Cinémathèque suisse, at Eclair Cinema, from the original negative.

SEASON SUPPORT FOR FILM/VIDEO
Rohauer Collection Foundation

SUPPORT FOR THE FILM/VIDEO STUDIO PROGRAM
Institute of Museum and Library Services

SUPPORT FOR ARTS ACCESS AT THE WEXNER CENTER
Cardinal Health Foundation
Huntington Bank

GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT FOR THE WEXNER CENTER
Greater Columbus Arts Council
Ohio Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Nationwide Foundation

Close

Past Film/Video

Hyenas