Xala

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Movie
German title Xala
Original title Xala
Country of production Senegal
original language French and Wolof
Publishing year 1975
length approx. 120 minutes
Age rating FSK -
Rod
Director Ousmane Sembène
script Ousmane Sembène
production Paulin Vieyra
music Samba Diabara Samb
camera Georges Caristan
occupation

Xala is a feature film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène from 1975. It is a film adaptation of his novel of the same name from 1973. Xala is a Wolof word and means "curse". The film premiered in July 1975 at the Moscow International Film Festival . The film was first shown on German television on March 26, 1976 on ARD.

action

The film takes place in Senegal after the end of the French occupation, where the country's upper class has more power than before, but has not changed much for the general population. The protagonist of the story is the minister and businessman El Hadji Abdou Kader, who can afford to have several wives, which is still legal according to old tradition. When he marries his third wife, he is placed under an old Senegalese curse that makes him impotent and puts him to shame on their wedding night. He went unsuccessfully in search of a cure, first with a modern doctor, later with traditional medicine men (using "witchcraft") and over time his social reputation dwindled and he finally lost his political office and his company to the beggar.

interpretation

Xala is a satire on the modern African bourgeoisie . The French colonial era is over, but the majority of the locals have not changed their living conditions with the political change. Only the white elite has been replaced by a handful of new African rulers. You are the winner of Senegal's independence. The protagonist's futile search for a cure for his impotence is a metaphor for the impossibility of achieving liberation by relying on Western technologies and bureaucratic structures as an African. Sembene himself spoke of the irony of an African modernism haunted by the curse of the past, in which failure also means political impotence.

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