Directed by Moustapha Alassane

A playfully subversive trailblazer of African cinema, Niger-born Moustapha Alassane created a charmingly lo-fi, irreverently imaginative world all his own. Featuring cartoon frogs, Wild West–style African cowboys, stop-motion puppets, and folkloric heroes, his often witty, iconoclastic fables take satiric aim at postcolonial politics and government corruption—calling out abuse of power wherever he saw it. Working across animation, narrative, experimental, and ethnographic filmmaking, he collaborated with renowned figures like animator Norman McLaren and documentarian Jean Rouch, but his style was all his own, unbeholden to Eurocentric conventions and steeped in Nigerien tradition and lore.