AN ADVENTURER'S HOMECOMING (1966)
Directed by Moustapha Alassane
34 minutes
"Jimi flies back to his native village after a long absence and convinces his friends to become cowboys. Renamed Black Cooper, John Kelly, Breaker, Billy Walter, and Queen Christine, they steal horses, terrorize sheepherders, and brawl in the neighborhood saloon to the horror of the locals. Drawing maximum effects from an economy of means, Alassane's brilliant comedy intertwines central modernization plots in West Africa and Europe after the war (a traveler's return, the youth problem, the arrival of new technology) with the outlaw gang and frontier-town-under-attack narratives that were mainstays of the western genre. By stripping these stories of their conventional moral weight, he opens his film, 'the first African western,' to the widest scope of possible interpretations." –Jamie Berthe & Sam Di Iorio