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Sembène tackles the question of women's lives in contemporary Dakar, Senegal's bustling capital. It's a warm, often funny story of a single mother, her two children, two ex-husbands, aged mother and assorted friends. Faat Kine, the manager of a sparkling new gas station, drives an elegant car, lunches with fashionable friends, and worries about her children passing their high school finals. But Sembène contextualizes his heroine's thoroughly modern triumphs and anxieties culturally and politically in a Dakar that has shantytowns as well as high-rises, streets crowded with cattle as well as Mercedes, and women whose lives have been shaped by tribal custom and male prejudice as much as by their ambitions. About Ousmane Sembène