Having graduated from acting school in Senegal, Mambéty worked as a stage actor at the Daniel Sorano National Theater in Dakar until he was expelled for disciplinary reasons.

The following year Mambéty made another short, Badou Boy, which won the Silver Tanit award at the 1970 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia.

At the time of his death Mambéty had been editing the second film of that series, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun), which premiered posthumously in 1999.

[1] Djibril Diop Mambéty's earliest film, a short entitled Contras'city (1968), highlighted the contrasts of cosmopolitanism and unrestrained ostentation in Dakar's baroque architecture against the modest, everyday lives of the Senegalese.

In 1970 Mambéty released his next short, Badou Boy, another sarcastic look at Senegal's capital that followed the adventures of what the director described as a "somewhat immoral street urchin who is very much like myself".

Considered by many to be his most daring and important film, Mambéty's feature-length debut, Touki Bouki (The Hyena's Journey) more fully developed his earlier themes of hybridity and individual marginality and isolation.

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.

An African adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's famous Swiss play, The Visit, Hyènes (Hyenas) tells the story of Linguere Ramatou, an aging, wealthy woman who revisits her home village—and Mambéty's—of Colobane.

This embittered woman, "as rich as the World Bank," will bestow upon Colobane a fortune in exchange for the murder of Dramaan Drameh, a local shopkeeper who abandoned her after a love affair and her illegitimate pregnancy when she was 16.

We are done for if we have traded our souls for money"[4] Although its characters are distinct, Mambéty considered Hyènes to be a continuation of Touki Bouki and a further exploration of its themes of power and insanity.

As the second installment in Mambéty's trilogy exalting the lives and promise found among ordinary Senegalese, the 45-minute film, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) depicts a young beggar girl, Sili, who on crutches, confidently makes her way through a city of obstacles, evading a group of bullies, and selling newspapers to make money for herself and her blind grandmother.

His luminous main character, Sili, manages to make this a sympathetic and optimistic look at the struggle and potential of Africa's most oppressed—young, female, poor, disabled.

Yet, his often unconventional, surrealist, fast-paced, non-linear style distinguishes Mambéty from other prominent filmmakers of Francophone African cinema who employed more traditional didactic, social realist narratives.

Through the film and in many interviews, the director suggests that Africans are short-sighted in looking to the colonial past for their future, and are misled by their unrestrained desires for material goods that ensure Africa's dependency on foreign aid.