Synopsis:
First-time feature filmmaker Salif Traore follows in the footsteps of master filmmaker Ousmane Sembene with this drama that follows a ‘bastard’ who returns to his rural Mali village after being cast out many years back. Zanga (Fili Traoré) was born out of wedlock, making him a figure of scorn to the locals. Many years after being unceremoniously ejected from the village, Zanga returns wearing theRead More »
Khalifa and Fanta, two children from a deprived suburb of Bamako, are expelled from school because they do not have the means to buy the necessary supplies. Here they are forced to collect garbage to try to finance their education. Exhausted by their work, children wear a look of mischievous replicas and humorous on the Malian changing society.Read More »
AllMovie Synopsis:
This film, directed by Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoku confronts the patriarchal traditions of Mali, including the controversial issue of female circumcision. A recent widow, Nanyuma feels liberated from the cruel treatment of her late husband but is ordered by the village chief to marry her husband’s equally oafish brother. She leaves the village and hides with her niece Fili but is eventually forced to return. Although her resistance to her culture’s rigid traditions stirs her people to a higher level of awareness of freedom and social independence, Nanyuma realizes that her only chance at claiming her own freedom will be by leaving her community. The film’s satiric approach is modeled after a theatrical tradition native to Mali.Read More »
In the harsh landscape of the Malian desert, Zamiatou fights to keep her two sons and daughter on the right path while dealing with a disabled husband who is mentally and physically scarred by his years as a political prisoner. Rejecting the idea of prostituting her daughter to French settlers for money, Zamiatou turns to a former lover, who lends her a donkey. With the animal in tow, she braves the desert alone to find a way to support her loved ones.Read More »
An adultery drama set in a bourgeois family in Bamako, Mali, where tensions are rife within the household: Mimi, bored with the polygamy and routine of marriage, wants to leave Issa. She has a lover, Abba. How will all three cope with this?Read More »
A forestry engineer pushes for reforestation measures, against the will of his selfish superiors, and embarks on a search for a mystical healing plant linking him with the ancestral knowledge of his people.Read More »
Quote:
Beginning in South Africa under the apartheid regime, the film follows a young girl who flees the country after a violent confrontation with a local white landowner in which her father is killed. She settles in Abidjan, where, ten years later, she has become a university student. As part of her studies, she visits the Taureg tribe on the edge of the Sahara before at last returning to post-Apartheid South Africa.Read More »
In the last days of 1999, after a few shots of a French supermarket, abundant in food and color, we hear Dramane compose a letter home to his father in Mali whom he then visits in the village of Sokolo. He meets the lovely Nana, and there are possibilities. People place long-distance calls from the post office. “Reaching people,” says the postmaster, “is a matter of luck.” Contrasts between Paris and Sokolo – between Mali and France and between Africa and Europe – are underscored by voice-over poems and comments by Aimé Césaire. A man dictates a letter to a brother in France: what is the nature of their hardships? People look for their place on this earth.Read More »
Synopsis
In this early work, Cissé focuses on a young innocent who has left the countryside for the city and become caught in the middle of social conflict. Befriended by the manager of a textile factory, he watches as his mentor is caught between the demands of a cruel owner and the needs of the much-abused workers he oversees. Having spent years studying Marxist ideology in Moscow, Cissé was the first African director to directly confront and criticize the condition of workers in the city. Yet the social constructs and characters he develops are presented with a clarity unencumbered by the typical moralizing of socialist films.
Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »