Guelwaar

“A work of wry sophistication” (Janet Maslin, New York Times), Guelwaar has the makings of a political farce in the spirit of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat. The body of a murdered political activist suddenly goes missing from the morgue. The police discover that his corpse has accidentally been carried to a neighboring village and given a Muslim burial (the dead man was Catholic). The attempts of his family to retrieve the body nearly escalate into a holy war. But farce Guelwaar most decidedly is not. Ousmane Sembène transforms his simple narrative into a complex, stirring examination of the legacy of colonialism in Africa. “Exceptional, tremendously moving. . . . Sembène is a little like Noam Chomsky in that he consciously sets out to compile a kind of counter-history, a corrective to the official record” (Georgia Brown, Village Voice).