résumé
The satirical documentary Contras' City (which stands for Contrast City) was shot on 16mm in 1968. It is one of the earliest African comic movie and an urban planning analysis of the “two Dakars”. It is considered the first African comedy. It is a satire on Dakar - a city in which styles and cultures are blended in a cosmopolitan small area. Mambety manipulates the classic documentary apparatus with the object of exploring social conflicts of the capital city.
Djibril Diop Mambéty's earliest film, a short entitled Contras City (1968), highlighted the contrasts of cosmopolitanism and unrestrained ostentation in Dakar's baroque architecture against the modest, everyday lives of the Senegalese. Mambéty's recurrent theme of hybridity--the blending of elements from precolonial Africa and the colonial West in a neocolonial African context—is already evident in Contras City, which is considered Africa's first comedy film.