Hyenas (Blu-ray)

One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki (1973) is a hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which in Mambety’s imagining follows a now-rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by western materialism. New 2K Restoration. Restored in 2018 by Thelma Film AG with the support of Cinemathèque suisse, at Eclair Cinema, from the original negative.