Meeting Djibril Diop Mambety: looking back at L’Œil de Mambety at MansA

To pay tribute to Djibril Diop Mambety, Hida Media invited the public to a cultural and cinematic journey around the series “Histoires des petites gens” (Tales of Little People), from Friday 30 January 2026 to Sunday 1 February 2026, at the Maison des mondes africains – MansA, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. A major figure of African cinema, Djibril Diop Mambety (1945-1998) was a Senegalese filmmaker, a rebel, a tireless walker of the margins.

He approached cinema driven by a single necessity: to film when he had something to say. His life shaped a free, dazzling and deeply singular body of work, where poetry, satire, politics and dreams meet to illuminate what he himself called “the dignity of little people”.

Far from a tribute in the strict sense, L’Œil de Mambety reveals the sources that feed his cinema, offering the public a living and poetic way into his universe.

The main stage of the journey was an exhibition that does not aim to be purely monographic, but rather a crossing of the imaginaries, influences and resonances that nourish the work of Djibril Diop Mambety, while echoing the new generation.

It was also an immersive exhibition built around several works of art and craft objects inviting the public into the very heart of Mambety’s cinema. At the centre of the space, an emblematic interview the director gave to the organisers of the Gindou Festival was screened.

Around this central element, several contemporary creations dialogued with his testimony: a customised motorbike evoking the rebellious aesthetic of the film Touki Bouki (1973); a gongoma made by François Gnemmi, inspired by the world of the film Le Franc (1994); a balloon sculpture referring to Badou Boy (1970), among many other references to the director’s cult films.

The second part of the exhibition explored daily life in Dakar more deeply through an installation, “the economy of the gaze”, by the artist Marianne Costade, echoing the central theme of Mambety’s work, which sets out to portray the Senegalese people.

The opening was enlivened by a DJ set extending the immersive atmosphere of the exhibition. The closing was marked by an artistic performance in which the silhouettes reinterpreted the elegance and freedom of “Mambetian” figures, drawing particularly on the films Hyenas, Touki Bouki and Le Franc, thanks to the involvement of three brands, AMULETTE, LEG1T and ATéMIT.

On the sidelines of the exhibition, Hida Media organised an immersive screening of the two films of the “Histoires de petites gens” series, Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, at the Ken Saro-Wiwa centre.

In the summer of 1994, Djibril Diop Mambety embarked on a project of three short films, to pay tribute to those he fondly called “the little people”. Originally conceived as a trilogy, this work could not be fully completed: only two films saw the light before Mambety’s death in 1998.

The “Histoires des petites gens” programme brought together archives, tributes and contemporary creations. It aims to offer an immersion in the spirit of the Senegalese filmmaker: a space where his legacy mingles with current forms, revealing the intact power of his work and the importance of passing it on today.