General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Hyenas

Hyenas (French: Hyènes; original working title Ramatou) is a 1992 Senegalese comedy-drama film directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, loosely adapting Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit and setting its story of revenge and purchased justice in the Senegalese village of Colobane.¹^•² It was Mambéty's second and final feature, released nearly twenty years after his debut Touki Bouki (1973), and it premiered in Competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Djibril Diop Mambéty, adapting Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit¹
Release	1992; screened in Competition at Cannes and at Locarno⁴^•⁵
Runtime / language	110 minutes (one source lists 113); Wolof, French, and Japanese⁶^•¹
Lead cast	Ami Diakhate as Linguère Ramatou; Mansour Diouf as Dramaan Drameh⁶
Central plot	A wealthy woman offers her impoverished home village a vast fortune in exchange for the death of the man who impregnated and abandoned her⁷
Key crew	Cinematography Matthias Kälin; music and art direction Wasis Diop; producers Pierre-Alain Meier and Alain Rozanès⁸
Restoration	Restored by Eclair in Vanves, France, over 2017 (Kino Lorber dates it 2018), undertaken by Thelma Film AG with support from the Cinémathèque suisse⁹^•¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

The village of Colobane, devastated by drought and unemployment, sees sudden hope in the return of a former citizen, Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate), who left her hometown as a young woman and now returns with a great fortune; she is described in the film as "as rich as the World Bank."⁷^•¹ The grocer Dramaan Drameh (Mansour Diouf), one of Colobane's leading citizens and Ramatou's former lover, is chosen to lead the welcoming committee.⁷

At a reunion, Ramatou reveals the depth of her bitterness. Years earlier Dramaan had impregnated her and denied paternity so that he could marry a wealthier woman; the village drove her from home, and she survived by prostitution before becoming extraordinarily rich.¹^•⁷ She offers the villagers a deal: a vast sum of money in exchange for Dramaan's death. The Black Film Center & Archive synopsis gives the figure as one hundred billion dalasis, the currency of Gambia, while the Lisboa film festival's synopsis gives ten thousand million; both describe the sum as extraordinary.⁷^•⁵ The citizens initially refuse, but as the village is flooded with consumer goods and driven deeper into debt, Dramaan begins to fear for his life, and the town faces a collective choice between the money and his life.⁷

Themes and style

Mambéty framed the film as a satire of greed and of post-colonial Africa's place in the global economy. "My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank," he said in an interview after completing the film. "I think my target is clear."² Critics have read the story in the same terms: the African Film Festival describes it as a parable of human greed turned into "a biting satire of today's Africa, betraying the hopes of independence for the false promises of Western materialism," and Kino Lorber calls it a satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams face erosion by western materialism.¹^•¹⁰

The adaptation moves Dürrenmatt's action from the Swiss hamlet of Güllen to the dusty roads of outer Dakar, and the critic Evan Moffitt, writing in Frieze, notes that the real village of Colobane was swallowed by Dakar's sprawl in the 1990s; the film ends with a view of the new airport built where Dramaan's grave is dug.³ Reviewers have also emphasized its tone: Time Out describes a heightened unreality comparable to magic realism, set in a village that "mysteriously blossoms into a metropolis," and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader observed that Mambéty implicates himself in the evil he depicts, playing a former judge who now works as a servant to the rich.¹¹^•¹²

Production and reception

Mambéty, the son of a Muslim cleric and member of the Lebou tribe, was born in Colobane, the town where the film is set, near Dakar.¹ Hyenas was produced as a multi-country co-production involving Senegal, France, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy, with production companies including Thelma Film AG, ADR Productions, Maag Daan, and MK2 Productions.⁶^•⁵ The cinematographer was Matthias Kälin, who had previously shot the 1989 film Yaaba for Mambéty's friend, the Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo, and the score was composed by Wasis Diop.⁷^•⁸

The film debuted at the 1992 Cannes festival, where it screened in Competition, and also played at Locarno, New York, Carthage, and Brussels.¹³^•¹⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% Tomatometer rating from 11 reviews.¹² Mambéty never made another feature; he died of lung cancer in a Paris hospital on July 23, 1998, at the age of 53, leaving the short La petite vendeuse de soleil (1999) as part of an unfinished trilogy.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Restoration

The film was restored over the course of 2017 by Eclair in Vanves, France, with the restoration undertaken by Thelma Film AG of Undervelier, Switzerland, with support from the Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne; Kino Lorber's page for its 2K restoration dates the work to 2018, from the original negative.⁹^•¹⁰ The restoration received theatrical re-releases beginning in 2019, including at Metrograph in New York, and the film was distributed by Kino Lorber.¹⁷^•¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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