Hyenas

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.