Ousmane Sembene’s latest release is a warm, often funny story of a single mother, her two children, two ex-husbands, aged mother, and assorted friends. Faat-Kine, the manager of a sparkling new gas station, drives an elegant car, lunches with fashionably dressed friends, and worries about her children passing their high school finals. But Sembene contextualizes his heroine’s thoroughly modern triumphs and anxieties within the complex culture and politics of Dakar, with its contrastive architecture of shantytowns and high-rises, streets crowded with cattle and Mercedes, and women whose lives have been shaped as much by tribal custom and male prejudice as by their twenty-first century aspirations. As it examines the changing roles of women in Senegalese society, Faat-Kine opens onto a new chapter in the career of this legendary director.