A sardonic grin, stretched across a face that is a map of compromises and petty cowardice. A lopsided gait, as if apologizing to the ground it walks on, yet ready to pounce, to snatch a scrap, an opportunity, a shred of survival. The figure of Asumani, the protagonist of "Touki Bouki", is imprinted on the viewer's retina not as a hero or an anti-hero, but as a biological principle: hunger. A hunger for food, for respect, for a place in the world that isn't on the margins of a carcass picked clean by history. With this 1981 feature—a work long considered lost and which re-emerged almost miraculously from a Lisbon archive—Djibril Mambéty Diop doesn't just tell a story; he orchestrates a dissonant, piercing symphony of dislocation, a picaresque poem with the dust of the Sahel in its lungs and the anarchy of the Nouvelle Vague in its editing.

The film opens in the chaotic, pulsating belly of a Dakar that is itself a character, a labyrinth of clamorous markets, suffocating alleyways, and decaying colonial architecture. Here, Asumani (played by the magnificent non-professional Sotigui Kouyaté, whose lanky figure seems sculpted by the wind) lives by his wits; he is an informant for hire, a shadow who sells other shadows for a few francs. He is the hyena of the title, despised by all but necessary to the ecosystem of misery. Diop films him without judgment, with a proximity that is almost tactile, capturing the sweat, the smell of spices and gasoline, the syncopated jazz spilling from a broken radio that serves as an ironic counterpoint to his precarious existence. The influence of "Touki Bouki" (1973) is evident in the kinetic energy, in the desire for escape, but whereas there the two young protagonists dreamed of Paris as a pop utopia, here Asumani's flight is a brutal necessity, a descent into the underworld with no promise of paradise.

When a betrayal larger than his own forces him to flee the city, the film undergoes a radical metamorphosis. The narrative, already fragmented, disintegrates into a series of existential tableaus. The city, with its perverse but comprehensible logic, gives way to a vast, metaphysical hinterland, a landscape of the soul reminiscent as much of the desolate plains of a Monte Hellman twilight western as of the cosmic silences of a Tarkovsky film. Asumani travels through ghost villages, encountering mad holy men, women as silent as sphinxes, and children who gaze at him with an ancient wisdom. His is not a journey of redemption—a Christian and Western concept entirely foreign to the film's spiritual grammar. It is, rather, a stripping away. Each kilometer traveled, each surreal encounter, robs him of a piece of his opportunistic, urban identity, forcing him to confront a void that is at once internal and geographical.

In this, Asumani is a direct descendant of the picaresque heroes of Spanish literature, a Lazarillo de Tormes catapulted into post-colonial Africa, but also a distant cousin to Céline's Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night. Like them, his only philosophy is survival, and his journey is a nihilistic odyssey through the absurdity of the human condition. But Diop, unlike Céline, never sinks into absolute cynicism. He injects into the desperation flashes of dazzling beauty and a surreal, almost Beckettian humor. One scene above all: Asumani, wracked with thirst, comes across a truck driver hauling bottles of Coca-Cola, that supreme symbol of capitalist neocolonialism. The driver refuses to give him a drink, but offers him a sermon on the importance of global trade. The sequence is shot in a single, shaky long take, with the buzz of the cicadas rising to a deafening volume, transforming a drama of thirst into a grotesque farce about the short circuit between modernity and primary needs.

On a formal level, "Touki Bouki" is an act of cinematic guerrilla warfare. Legend has it that Diop shot on expired 16mm film stock, a gift from a French television crew. The chemical instability of the film, exposed to the blistering heat, produced anomalous color casts, burns at the edges of the frame, and fluctuations in the grain that another director would have discarded as technical errors. Diop, instead, incorporates them into the film's aesthetic fabric. These "defects" become the visible scars of the narrative, an objective correlative for the wounded psyche of the protagonist and of an entire continent. The film's color palette veers from a blinding ochre to a deep, nocturnal blue—colors that are not realistic but emotional, as if the film stock itself were bleeding the characters' emotions. It is an aesthetic that seems to anticipate by decades the visual experiments of directors like Wong Kar-wai, but is rooted in a poetics of scarcity, of "making cinema from nothing," that was characteristic of the new waves of the Global South.

The film is also a profound meta-textual dialogue with the image of Africa itself. Diop categorically rejects exoticism and Third-Worldist rhetoric. His Africa is not a pre-colonial Eden to be mourned, nor a passive victim to be pitied. It is a complex, contradictory organism, full of energy and inertia, of magic and squalor. The hyena, Asumani, thus becomes a potent metaphor: he is the modern African, uprooted from tradition but not yet integrated into a modernity that presents itself in the form of incomprehensible fetishes (Coca-Cola, faded posters for American movies). He is forced to be a "bricoleur" of his own existence, assembling an identity from the fragments he finds, just as a griot assembles a story from fragments of myth and chronicle.

The journey concludes not with an arrival, but with a dissolve into the landscape. Asumani, reduced to his essence, comes face to face with a real hyena, the animal. There is no struggle, no catharsis. Just a moment of silent recognition, a look between two beings who know the fundamental law of the world: eat or be eaten, and perhaps, find a strange dignity in this eternal cycle. The final shot shows him as a small figure walking away toward an infinite horizon, neither saved nor damned, simply on his way.

To rewatch "Touki Bouki" today is to confront a work of staggering modernity. It is a film that speaks to our global present of migration, fluid identities, and crises of meaning, but does so with a cinematic language that is at once ancestral and avant-garde. It is an experience that shakes you, that gets you dirty, that offers no easy answers but asks essential questions. This is not a film to be "appreciated" in the bourgeois sense of the word; it is a film to be submitted to, to be breathed in, a piece of cinema that clings to you like desert dust and continues to burn in your eyes long after the house lights have come up. A necessary masterpiece, a wound that refuses to heal.