Madame Brouette

Colour, 35 mm
Canada, Senegal, France, 2002, 104 min
Section: Horizons - Awarded films
Oficiální stránky: www.lafete.com/madamebrouette

Synopsis

Mati, nicknamed Madame Brouette, is a young energetic Senegalese woman who at a glance differs little from her female neighbours: they and their families are just trying to survive life in Sandaga shantytown. While her peers are resigned to their bitter fates, Mati is quick to rebel and express open disagreement whenever she comes across injustice. She bravely takes care of a woman beaten by her husband, and she herself divorces, determined to raise her daughter without help. She does not take kindly to limits, not even those set by her lover, and she even dares to realize her dream of owning a small French restaurant. Such rebellion, however, seems always to end in punishment…. The director skilfully avoids melodrama and offers a spectacle in which elements of ironic exaggeration, musical stylisation and an intentionally trivialized dramatization of reality are conveyed through the outlines of a lively work of emancipation propaganda. The film is also engaging as a spectacle with seemingly choreographed crowd scenes, which profits from the colour and ornamentality of the native dress and local environment.

About the director

Moussa Sene Absa (b. 1958, Dakar) is a Senegalese artist who feels confident in several fields – as a film and television screenwriter, as a writer of plays he produces, and as an actor and painter exhibiting work in Europe and North America. To ensure a greater audience, Absa makes his films in French. He was commended for a script entitled Les Enfants de Dieu, then went on to debut in film with the short Le prix du mensonge (awarded in Carthage in 1988). In 1991 he shot his first feature on 16 mm, Ken Bugul, and followed it up a year later with three shorts. His other features are Ca twiste a Poponguine (1993) and Tableau ferraille (1997), both of which were warmly received internationally and took important awards. Absa’s on-going theme is the lack of women’s rights in Senegalese society.