Ibrahim Dieng, long-term unemployed, with two wives and seven children, receives a money order from his nephew in Paris to the amount of 25,000 francs, which he is to share with his relatives. In order to lay his hands on the generous sum, he has to work his way through the intricate maze that is Senegalese bureaucracy – on the face of it, an impossible mission. A mislaid identity card sees Ibrahim becoming a helpless participant in an absurd farce about bribery, fraud and official indifference, which adopts a searingly ironic tone to lay bare the social situation in 1960s Senegal. In this celebrated adaptation of his own novel, Sembène, the “father of African cinema”, harnesses the Kafkaesque spirit as he examines the theme of money and corruption in an African country divided between tradition and modernity.