Buud Yam

1997, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Gaston Kaboré

A sequel of sorts to Wênd Kûuni, the 1982 film that put Gaston Kaboré on the map. He returns to both the characters and the actors from that film and while there are deliberate resonances between the two pictures, including brief flashbacks that are actually footage from Wend Kuuni, this stands on its own as an exploration of pre-colonial Sahel life. It's not entirely historically accurate in terms of the depiction of a rather abundant and largely conflict-free swath of territory and yet it also succeeds in giving a strong sense of the existence of numerous loosely associated societies that often have trouble understanding one another even on the linguistic level (a phenomenon that continues today, and which contributes to the real challenges posed by borders that cut through pre-existing societies). While the storyline is straightforward, narrating the search by Wênd Kûuni for a legendary healer intercut with sequences featuring the young man's ailing sister, it's rich in its generosity of spirit, and very open about suspicions within village life but also the ways in which those suspicions can be healed. Visually some of the landscapes of southern Burkina Faso are lovely, and I also liked the way that Kaboré shot most of the film in medium/long shot so you can really see the interactions between the characters, while there are a few moments of wonderful humour, particularly a sequence in which a group of riverbank kids enjoy observing some clueless newcomers. 

Ouaga Saga

2004, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Dani Kouyaté

Dani Kouyaté's third feature - after Keita! L'héritage du griot and Sia, le rêve du python - is one of the strongest recent movies I've seen from Africa, a film of tremendous energy and warmth that, sadly, hasn't received the distribution it deserves. While Kouyaté's previous films deal to a great degree with mythologies of the African past - and the ways in which they impact on the present - Ouaga Saga feels more determinedly modern, playing with mythologies of a very different kind, as it draws in images, in particular, from American popular cinema. In that, the film follows in an African filmmaking tradition set in motion by Djibril Diop Mambéty, a tradition likely to co-opt images and ideas from across different cultures - one of Mambéty's films is an adaptation of a Swiss play - and given sustained life by Cameroon's Jean-Pierre Bekolo.
Kouyaté's film makes reference to an extraordinary breadth of cinematic history, challenging some academic analyses of African cinema, which have a tendency to obscure the rich popular cinemas - American and Indian in particular - that also beguile African audiences and African filmmakers (I remember attending a question and answer with the Burkinabé director Fanta Regina Nacro, who mischievously upended a questioner by indicating that the main inspirations for her first short film were not from Africa at all, but rather from Chaplin and Hitchcock).

The first section of Ouaga Saga is reminiscent of sequences in Sembène's novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu and Tierno Monénembo's later work Cinéma, both of which underline the tremendous popularity of cowboy movies; in those novels, the characters throw plot points and favourite titles back in forth in a kind of conversational combat. Here, we see the cinema audience in an early scene transfixed by every gunfight and horseback chase, while later one of the characters - known as Sheriff, and clearly the most obsessive of the bunch - gives an account of a film viewing that conflates parts of The Magnificent Seven with The Wild Bunch and Gunfight at the OK Corral, and many more besides (that the audience is depicted in front of Rio Bravo, a film with little of the kind of action we see imitated, is perhaps just a filmmaker's in-joke).
Kouyaté's reference points aren't limited, however, to westerns, or to the West - later in the film, the title of one of Claire Denis's films, S'en fout la mort, which deals with African immigrants in France, is painted on a minibus, while one of Ouaga Saga's characters dresses in clothes that recall the male protagonist from Mambéty's Touki Bouki. What's remarkable about all this, though, is the expert way in which Kouyaté weaves the cinematic references into the fabric of the film so that they enhance rather than distract from his story: his film breathes deeply of the air of Ouagadougou, insisting on the idea that there's hope to be found in those streets too rather than simply in far away cinematic worlds.

Despite the global points of reference, explicitly celebrated in the film's conclusion, Kouyaté never loses sight of the specificity of his setting, and the economic realities - and institutional challenges - his characters are likely to face, but he refuses to envelope them in miserabilism, adopting instead the kind of upbeat, celebratory tone of the Congolese success La Vie est belle - notably one of the most successful of African films in Africa. If Kouyaté were able to get his film distributed - in Africa and elsewhere - he might find himself with a similar hit on his hands.

Tasuma

2004, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Kollo Sanou

The shadow of Ousmane Sembène is never far from Kollo Sanou's Tasuma, which deals with an elderly man's attempts to get the military pension to which he is entitled by virtue of his long service in the French military. Where Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye examined a bloody event at the end of the Second World War, the culmination of a series of protests by West African veterans of that conflict, Sanou opts, however, for a contemporary setting, and the gentler style of a village comedy.

Despite the pastoral background (and the fact that much of the film's funding comes from France) Sanou is unequivocal about the injustices suffered by his protagonist, Sogo (Mamadou Zerbo), and many of his fellow-soldiers - who've not only been denied their pensions but have suffered the ignominy of being paid far less than their French counterparts for equal service. Whereas the theme may relate to that of Camp de Thiaroye, the plot hews closer to that of Sembène's much earlier Mandabi, chronicling the bureaucratic absurdities of the quest to be paid a pension, with one office after another turning the old soldier away. There's an echo of Sembène, too, in the role of women in the film: they protest when Sogo finds himself cornered by the lack of action on his pension and his own desire to improve life in his village (he's a relative progressive, staunchly opposed to forced marriage, for instance).

The near-constant echoes of Sembène's films have the unfortunate consequence, however, of reminding the viewer that Sanou is a far less assured filmmaker. Where Sembène poses open-ended questions, Sanou simply seems unable to resolve his plotting, and introduces contradictions particularly with the treatment of the Arab trader who has a major role in the action. At times, the film portrays him in a positive light but at other moments he's seen to be unsympathetic, with no great logic to the changes; the film gives no particularly convincing motivation, for example, for the trader's ultimate act of generosity (in some ways, Sogo and his friends are as cavalier with the rules as the French authorities who are the source of so much ire, and the trader pays the price on this occasion). Less excusable than such narrative infelicities - which some might view as evidence of a grounding in the tangential style of oral narrative - are often awkward framings, and what seems to be careless camerawork, in which characters are sliced down the middle or cut off halfway up their faces when they lean forward, unusual in a film from a country with a history of producing strong visual storytellers.

The Night of Truth

2004, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Fanta Régina Nacro (original title: La Nuit de la vérité)

Set in an unnamed African country in the aftermath of a brutal civil war, Fanta Régina Nacro's début feature inevitably invites comparison with other films that have emerged since the Rwandan genocide, although Nacro's film is also inspired - in the director's own telling - by the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone/Liberia. Like Raoul Peck's television film about Rwanda, Sometimes in April, The Night of Truth is brutally honest - sometimes gruesomely so - about the realities of war, leaving no room for audience complacency, while Nacro is sharply perceptive about the kinds of sacrifices that may be required to effect true peace; she also foregrounds the critical role of women in ensuring that peace, once the men have laid down their arms (here, unlike in some of the conflicts that inspired the film, the warring sides are two armies rather than rag-tag bands of guerrillas).

After the gentler yet probing tone of her short films, The Night of Truth comes as a strikingly different choice of subject matter for the director, but she marries a serious theme with anecdotes of daily life - featuring, for example, women at work in the kitchen, or soldiers conversing - in a manner similar to that of Abderrahmane Sissako's more recent Bamako, an effective strategy that ensures that the conflict and its consequences are seen in vividly human terms, rather than remaining distant abstractions. Nacro extracts solid performances from the many non-professionals in the cast - who include all of the soldiers - but she also benefits from two exceptional female leads, who play the wives of the two men who have come together to hammer out a peace.

Un Certain matin

1991, Burkina Faso, directed by Fanta Régina Nacro

Fanta Régina Nacro's first short film is, by her own account, an amalgam of two of her major cinematic influences, Chaplin and Hitchcock, a combination of slapstick and tension that is more successful with regard to the former than the latter. The film's central gag is a clever visual joke that plays with our expectations of what a film from Africa will deliver; the punchline is set up with a scene that appears to be from a timeless, pre-colonial Africa, with events quickly going in unexpected directions. Nacro's film is a commentary, among other things, on the influence of filmmakers on African communities, and a plea for communication and understanding - as well as something of a love letter to the idea of cinema.

Delwende

2005, Burkina Faso/France/Switzerland, directed by S. Pierre Yaméogo

S. Pierre Yaméogo's Delwende is in some sense a return to the source, the rich vein of Burkinabé cinema centered on the village. However, like Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Malian film Finzan, it is a harsh critique of the way that village life treats the weak, and particularly women. The story centers on two women, one forced to marry against her will, the other - her mother - denounced as a witch as the villagers attempt to find a scapegoat for a meningitis epidemic sweeping the countryside (the villagers, with the exception of one easily dismissed character, are oblivious to the radio reports on the sickness).

The older woman is cast out of her village, and forced, eventually, to the streets of Ouagadougou and ultimately a refuge for women who have been similarly denounced, though the refuge itself is a tragic place, and Yaméogo underlines the women's terrible fate in documenting the hangar-like institution with almost brutal candour. When she hears the news the daughter, Pougbila, embarks on a quest to find her mother and confront the village. In telling Pougbila's story Yaméogo creates an authentically magnetic heroine, whose energy is compelling, and whose strength of belief is a powerful weapon; there's a magnificent shot that tracks her arrival into Ouagadougou, walking alongside a herd of cattle but focused absolutely on her own mission.

Women with Open Eyes

1994, Togo, directed by Anne-Laure Folly

Keïta! L'héritage du griot

1995, Burkina Faso, directed by Dani Kouyaté

The key dilemma at the heart of director Dani Kouyaté's first feature - a theme that recurs in many films from Africa - is the confrontation between tradition and modernity; here he explores more specifically how the two notions manifest themselves in the education of a young boy, torn between the obligations of his standard schooling and the beguiling tales spun by his family's griot, who travels from the country to the city to tell young Mabo the legend from which his name is derived. It's a clever idea that also allows the director to stage several sections from that legend, the Sundjata epic that recounts the adventures of Sundjata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire in the 13th century; Kouyaté solves the problems of staging mythical epics on a shoestring creatively and often very humorously.

The griot himself is played by Kouyaté's own father Sotigui Kouyaté with great charisma, and there's a powerful sense in which father and son are engaged in their own process of transmission of shared heritage. Like other Burkinabè filmmakers, particularly Gaston Kaboré, they are also interested in the ways in which the past can shed light on the present and future, and the path navigated by Mabo, whose Western-style education is complemented by a strong awareness of his roots, is notably optimistic in resolving the tradition/modernity confrontation.

Zan Boko

1988, Burkina Faso, directed by Gaston Kaboré

Gaston Kaboré's second feature confronts traditional village in Burkina Faso with the encroaching modernity of the city, juxtaposing quite literally a rural farm compound with the luxury home of a wealthy citizen of the expanding capital city, Ouagadougou. Kaboré is a master of the 'village film' genre, well aware of the clichés of that style of filmmaking, and he cleverly sets the audience up by toying with our expectations of what is to come: the opening sequence implies a 'timeless' African setting, but the Kaboré adds, spaced a few minutes apart, a water pump, a bicycle and, finally, a pick-up truck to underline that this story is absolutely contemporary, and that traditional ways exist in parallel with a new economy.

Thematically, the film is more ambitious than his previous Wênd Kûuni, exploring issues of government corruption and the confrontation of tradition and modernity, but it shares a concern with the fundamental value of human dignity and of broader social justice, without for a moment being anything less than pragmatic about the way of the world. Although the later stages repeat a little too obviously points that have already been made with some subtlety, the film remains a potent indictment of Burkina Faso's political system. The final scenes exemplify in many ways the ideals of the young leader Thomas Sankara, assassinated in October 1987, around the time this film was being made; the abrupt ending of real political debate in the film parallels the leader's untimely death.

Wênd Kûuni

1982, Burkina Faso, directed by Gaston Kaboré

'Village films' constitute a genre of themselves with African cinema, and Burkinabé directors have made some of the most notable contributions; Idrissa Ouedraogo's films, like Yaaba, made waves internationally, while Gaston Kaboré has spent his entire career reworking and subverting the genre (his most recent film, Buud Yam, from 1997, functions as a kind of sequel to this film). Although on the surface, Wênd Kûuni appears to be a simple recreation of a pre-colonial, 'timeless' Africa, the kind of film that some critics have attacked for simply providing exotic images to the West, in truth it deconstructs and makes use of the rhythms and logic of folk tales to convey a plea for tolerance that ultimately calls into question at least some aspects of tradition.

Like Ousmane Sembène, Kaboré is particularly concerned with the treatment of women, and contrasts the experiences of two different villages dealing with issues surrounding the re-marriage of widows (or, in one case, a woman who is assumed to be a widow simply because her husband has been absent for so long). The deceptive simplicity of the treatment masks, almost until the end, the power of the indictment of the crueler consequences of tradition. Kaboré's film has a beguiling tempo, too, that draws the viewer in, pushing the story forward while capturing a sense of the rituals of daily life and social interaction that, in some cases, continue to survive.