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"A key figure in the cinema of a newly independent Niger in the 1960s and ‘70s, Moustapha Alassane was a fantasist and a fabulist—but by no means was he lost in his own fertile imagination, cut off from contemporary events. Through films that ran the gamut from animations (the first from sub-Saharan Africa) to fiction to ethnographic studies, all of them steeped in Nigerien ritual and tradition, Alassane smuggled stinging satire within deceptively charming fables, his early films winning him the admiration of and prompting creative collaborations with animator Norman McLaren, documentarian Jean Rouch, and Zalika Souley, one of Africa’s greatest actresses. A pioneer of one of Africa’s richest filmmaking traditions, for whom a playful art is the medium of a potent anti-colonialist intelligence."—Metrograph