Mory, a charismatic cowherd who drives a motorcycle mounted with a bull-horned skull, and Anta, a female student, meet in Dakar. Alienated and tired of life in Senegal, they dream of going to Paris and come up with different schemes to raise money for the trip. Mory eventually succeeds in stealing the money, and a large amount of clothing, from the household of a wealthy homosexual while the latter is taking a shower. Anta and Mory can finally buy tickets for the ship to France. But when Anta boards the ship in the Port of Dakar, Mory, poised on the gangplank behind her, is suddenly seized by an inability to leave his roots, and he runs away madly to find his bull-horned motorcycle, only to see that it has been ruined in a crash that nearly killed the rider who had taken it. The ship sails away with Anta but not Mory, who sits next to his hat on the ground, staring disconsolately at his wrecked motorcycle.
Based on his own story and script, Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki with a budget of $30,000 - obtained in part from the Senegalese government. Though influenced by French New Wave, Touki Bouki displays a style all its own. Its camerawork and soundtrack have a frenetic rhythm uncharacteristic of most African films - known for their often deliberately slow-paced, linearly evolving narratives. Through jump cuts, colliding montage, dissonant sonic accompaniment, and the juxtaposition of premodern, pastoral and modern sounds and visual elements, Touki Bouki conveys and grapples with the hybridization of Senegal. Under colonisation, the filmmakers usually could produce their films and images which were market-friendly and welcomed by the colonisers, whereas actual situations in Africa could not be depicted for audiences. However, Senegal gained its independence in the 1960s, paving the way for filmmakers to produce films and create the Third Cinema, in which they no longer needed to emulate Hollywood films. As an African, director Mambéty tried to show his homeland to his audience by using African actors and actresses as main characters, while revealing the struggle between seeking a good future in Paris or staying in their familiar homeland of Senegal. The story used a new editing method with quite a few items containing symbolic meaning, stimulating the understanding and thinking of plotlines for the audience.
