Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi is an adaptation of his novella The Money Order. Ibrahima Dieng (Makhourédia Guèye) receives a money order from a hard-working nephew in Paris, who requests that he withdraw the funds on his behalf. This seemingly simple task unravels into a mess of bureaucratic red tape worsened by Ibrahima’s illiteracy, lack of identification papers and tendency to lend more than he owns. As Ibrahima is chased by creditors, debtors, scammers and bureaucrats (including one played by Sembène), his strong-willed wives (Ynousse N'Diaye and Isseu Niang) hold down the fort. As a French-Senegalese co-production, Mandabi was required to have two cuts: one in French and one in Wolof, making it the first feature-length film in an African language. Unlike Sembène’s earlier films, which use French dubbing as an extratextual layer of colonial violence, Mandabi’s characters conspicuously switch from Wolof to French when cheating one another. Despite his reticence to film Mandabi in color, Sembène’s palette is stunning and selective, concentrated in striking visual motifs: a white doll, a red bra, a crumpled piece of paper.