FAAT-KINE Milestones

When Kine (the marvelous Venus Seye), a gas-station manager in present-day Senegal, realizes that she is financially unable to provide for her two college-age children’s desired European travel and study, she starts to reevaluate her own life of dreams deferred and achievement denied.

She was a student once too, with aspirations of becoming a lawyer, but all that changed after an affair with a charismatic, married professor landed her shamed, pregnant, and expelled from school. Later, the father of Kine’s second illegitimate child wooed her while slowly siphoning away her life savings, landing himself in prison before their son was born. So, Kine is a survivor, of her own life and the men in it-one of a long succession of African women exploited by a callow patriarchy.

The penultimate film directed by the late Ousmane Sembene (who was 78 at the time of its release), FAAT KINE is at once an intimate, human family drama and a spry, nimble consideration of a new West Africa at odds with its colonial legacy.