The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun

This wonderful short film by Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety is cause for both celebration and great sadness. It's a joyous, beautifully made testament to pluck and perseverance under the direst circumstances, but also the last film Mambety completed before his untimely death in 1998. Undaunted by the bad leg that leaves her dependent on a pair of bright red crutches, 12-year-old Sili Laam (Lissa Balera) usually leaves her shanty-town home on the outskirts of Dakar to beg for money alongside her blind grandmother (Dieynaba Laam) in the marketplace. But Sili's ambitious, and once she notices the aggressive newspaper boys shoving one another out of the way to...