This audacious film captures the exuberance of youth with the tale of a young man who returns to his small Nigerien home town from a trip to the US bearing a suitcase full of costumes fit for a Western. In no time, he and his friends are using both town and countryside as the set for their own Wild West adventure, but as their destructive abandon grows, the village elders take an increasingly dim view of their romps. The syncretism between tradition and modernity, Africa and beyond, implicitly proposed by Alassane proved to be influential to other African filmmakers, including Djibril Diop Mambety; this film would be a major inspiration on Touki Bouki.

Poles away from the rambunctiousness of The Return of an Adventurer is the evocative gentleness of Aoure, the elegantly simple tale of the courtship and marriage of a young couple in a Djerma village on the banks of the Niger. Alassane stages his narrative through episodes of everyday life as well as traditional Muslim celebrations.

This making-of companion to The Return of an Adventurer revels in the high spirits that accompanied the creative chaos onscreen. It was directed by Serge Moati, one of Alassane’s compatriots in the early days of Nigerien cinema.