CineMAfriq Film Series

Link to film (BU Login only) 
Note: this film may be available via Kanopy through your public library.

Tableau Ferraille offers an intimate view of how modernization, at least as practiced in today's Africa, corrodes traditional communities and retards grassroots development. Like such past Senegalese masterpieces as Ousmane Sembene's Xala and Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas, it deplores a corrupt post-colonial elite's exploitation of the promise of African independence.
(In French and Wolof with English subtitles.)

(89 minutes)

1. For Wolof learners/speakers: are there any cultural or language cues non-speakers might miss? Overall thoughts on use of language, and how & when it was used?

2. What are your overall impressions of the film? Did you like it? What did you learn? 

3. Does this film have an overarching message? What was it? And what was it's overall tone? (Hopeful? Bleak? Both?) 

4. Thoughts about music and dance in the film? How did they contribute to the overall narrative?

5. What are your thoughts about how women were portrayed in the film? Their relationship one another and to men? What might this film have to say about social roles and expectations in that society? What does it mean to be a woman? 

6. Did you sense a tension between modernity and traditional ways of life? Did the story seem to preference one over the other? How? 

7. How did you feel about the ending of the film? How might you have changed it? 

Daam - main character; a well-intentioned but vacillating European-trained politician
Gagnesiri - Daam's first wife, very traditional
Kiné - Daam's second wife, aspires to own art galleries
Présidentt - antagonist; head of the warehouse and proposing a bridge be built
Anta - Gagnesiri’s friend, who falls sick & dies
Ndoumbe - Anta’s daughter, turns to prostitution