A Tooth for a Tooth

A darkly comic take on being on the wrong end of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures, A Tooth for a Tooth follows a Senegalese civil servant who, thanks to the stroke of a pen by IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, suddenly loses his job. Humiliations ensue as our hero attempts to navigate a country under the heel of foreign financiers, until finally one thought remains: vengeance upon Strauss-Kahn himself. Satirizing masculine disempowerment and Senegal’s fiscal realities, A Tooth for a Tooth plays like a comedy, but its ending—of riots and youth with “no dreams of living in their own country”—reveals its anguish.