As demonstrated by testimonies and scenes in the documentary, the symbiotic relationship between Mambéty and Colobane goes far beyond that of an artist and his muse, which may first come to mind. For indeed, to the neighborhood children of Colobane, Djibril Diop Mambéty is a hero on- and off-screen. Shots of local movie theaters and joyous children playing between houses in narrow sandy streets provide echoes to Mambéty’s own experience growing up in the cinephilic environment of Colobane. His artistic career began on the stage, at the Daniel Sorano National Theatre of Dakar, before he shifted to filmmaking, similar to the shift Ousmane Sembène made from literature in the 1960s.

Though the documentary seamlessly transitions between on-camera interviews and fragments of Mambéty’s previous works, the filming of Hyenas remains its central focus, whether as a means to get into the creative mind of the director, who walks around in the judge costume he wears in the film, or to document the making of this feature after the critically acclaimed Touki Bouki. Hyenas, as Mambéty sums it up himself, is the story of Linguère Ramatou, who returns to Colobane after 30 years to claim revenge for her exile, saying, “The world made a whore out of me, so I’ll make a whorehouse of the world.” This adaptation of The Visit (1956), a play by the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, is inscribed in postcolonial African contexts, where loss of moral values and human greed are epitomized by hyenas in the film. The hyena, like the vulture, rarely kills but instead feasts on carcasses, thus assuming the role of scavenger in its contribution to balancing the ecosystem. This differs from the portrayal of the film’s townspeople, who tear each other down rather than collectively build up the community. They more closely resemble the hyena in popular tales such as La Belle histoire de Leuk-le-lièvre (1953) by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Abdoulaye Sadji, or the many iterations of West African folktales involving the hare and the greedy, gullible hyena who is always outsmarted by the hare. Ramatou Linguère outsmarts the townspeople by setting things in motion by proposing to give Colobane billions to kill Draman Drameh, her ex-lover who had left her pregnant at 17 for another woman.

Hyenas is not only a testament to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s long-standing commitment to telling the stories of ordinary people but also an example of how his modest background shaped his storytelling, which underlines an interplay of form and content. Gavron’s documentary brings the people’s artist Mambéty into focus through on-screen voiceovers discussing of the hyena hole filled with beggars in Hyenas: “Djibril has spent most of his life with those people. He has no problem with beggars. He loves beggars. They are his. Djibril likes sharing. You can’t understand his love of beggars if you don’t understand his love of himself.” But above all, Mambéty loved cinema, and his impressive filmography shown in the documentary provides insights into a creative process in which time and detailed attention were given to the different stages of filmmaking. The proliferation of film labs and training programs in Africa today reaffirms this necessity for film projects to be fully nurtured before the actual production begins. This may be one of the explanations for the reemergence of quality African films garnering recognition at home and abroad.