Contras' City / City of Contrasts (2021 The Film Foundation / World Cinema Project restoration)

Djibril Diop Mambéty: Contras' City (SN 1968).

Senegal 1968. Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty. Scen.: Djibril Diop Mambéty. M.: Jean-Bernard Bonis, Marino Rio. Mus.: Djimbo Kouyaté. Int.: Inge Hirschnitz, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Prod.: Kankourama. DCP. Col. 15 min
    This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema.
    French and Wolof version with English subtitles.
    From: The Film Foundation, Filmmakers for Film Preservation.
    Restored in 2021 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and L’Image Retrouvée laboratories. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The 4K restoration of Contras’ City was made from the internegative as well as the original sound negative provided by Teemour Mambéty and preserved at LTC Patrimoine. A vintage print of the film was used as reference for color grading.
    Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022: Cinemalibero.
    Introduced by  Cecilia Cenciarelli e Elena Correra
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian by Chiara Belluzzi et al. at Cinema Jolly, Bologna, 25 June 2022

Aboubakar Sanogo (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022): " There is hardly any better way to enter the world of Djibril Diop Mambéty than through Contras’ City, his 1968 manifesto-like city symphony classic. In it, he literally offers the theory of his cinema and his theory of cinema: “The cinema is the art of making the contingent necessary, essential, inescapable, incontrovertible.” Indeed, Roland Barthes would have defined it as “The Cinema of the Punctum”, discernible primarily through the casting of the irreverent, playful and poetic gaze on the real. "

" Contras’ City is cast as an impressionistic and dialogical tour of Dakar, Senegal’s metropolis, in which Mambéty paints the contradictorily plural identities of his city through its arch tecture ([neo]classical colonial European through Islamic), hints at its politics caught between legacies of colonialism, reigning neocolonialism, and aspirations to emancipated subjecthood, reveals its cultures shaped by the forces of Negritude, Christianity, Islam and modern, secular and cosmopolitan worldliness. Like Dakar, the film is a tour de force, which carries multiple identity papers, partaking at once in registers of the poetic, the observational, the reflexive, the ironic/humorous/comedic, the interactive, the subjective, the class-conscious, in short, the essayistic. " Aboubakar Sanogo

AA: A lovely, inspired, irreverent city symphony of Dakar, based on playful associations, satirical observations of the clash of cultures, and an irresistible joy of life conveyed in vivid colour and a panache in the soundtrack.