Mambety's final film would be great for high-school or college classes

The Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's last work, the brief (42 minutes!) feature The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun (yes, the upper-case The is intentional - as what she's selling are copies of the daily newspaper The Sun) - is a close look at the street people of Dakar, their difficult lives, their painful rivalries, and their occasional instances of solidarity and affection. The eponymous young girl - perhaps about 10 years old - starts off begging for money to support her and her blind grandmother. While doing so - unsuccessfully - she observes a group of teenage boys selling copies of the newspaper on the street. The next day she sets off - with great difficulty, as she uses crutches because of what she calls a "bad knee" and gets copies of the paper on credit from a sympathetic distributor. Amazingly, a wealthy guy - he looks like a film star or athlete - buys the whole packet from her and gives her an enormous tip. As she sets about using this money for benevolent deeds in the community, the other vendors, jealous, set out to get her and to drive away he competition; one benevolent soul, a somewhat older and much more agile and fit young man, protects her. That's pretty much it. The characters are not fully developed and plot line is thin and we have to wonder - as DDM made this film as he was near a young death (lung cancer) if he hadn't planned something more grand and complex, like his two great (and only feature-length) films, Touki Bouki and Hyenas; nevertheless, what we have is a really good film that apparently used for the entire cast real street people from Dakar, so the movie has almost a documentary quality. I streamed this film from the excellent service, Kanopy, which is a service provided by a national consortium of libraries - and this film is appropriate for that site as it would be a great film for viewing and class discussion about a range of issues - poverty, colonialism, social relations - in many high schools or colleges.