Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 masterpiece, Hyenas, is a film about people being pushed to their breaking points. A loose adaptation of Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, the film’s central conflict is the relationship between billionaire Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate) and local shopkeeper Dramaan Drameh (Mansour Diouf). Once young lovers, Linguère returns to her birthplace, the village of Colobane, with a simple offer for its inhabitants: she will invest “a hundred thousand million” into the village on the condition that they kill Dramaan, the man who used the corrupt and patriarchal judicial system to exile her from Colobane after he impregnated her.  Full of biting black comedy and heartbreaking destruction, Mambéty engages with the classic philosophical question: What do we owe to each other? The answer, in the context of the colonially-imposed neoliberalism of Mambéty’s native Senegal, is nothing.  Everything in Hyenas is transactional. The village of Colobane is rundown, in…

---