Guimba

1995, Mali/Burkina Faso/France, directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko


Like Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen, Guimba uses a historical setting to comment on contemporary misuses of power in Mali (both films are concerned with the later years of Moussa Traoré's rule; he was ousted in a 1991 coup). Like the earlier film, Guimba is a challenging work that can't simply be approached as a straightforward narrative, although the bookends with a griot strolling along the Niger river imply a simple folk tale. Director Cheick Oumar Sissoko blends realism and magic, not to mention high drama and low comedy, and it can occasionally be difficult to keep track of the action: the real and the magical are so thoroughly blended, indeed, that the distinction is almost meaningless.

Like Yeelen - and like Sissoko's subsequent film, La Genèse - this is also a profoundly beautiful film, making wonderful use of the dusty Malian landscapes, and also consciously evoking imagery of the Western film in witty fashion. While the contemporary resonances are clear, it's also an honest attempt to show that the pre-colonial period wasn't simply an idyllic era, and that abuse of power is a universal ill. The depiction of a rotten system is blunt, with a particular insight into the manner in which a régime's worst excesses come at the end, when power is slipping away.

Women with Open Eyes

1994, Togo, directed by Anne-Laure Folly

Finzan

1989, Mali, directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko

Cheick Oumar Sissoko's second film is centered on the idea of rebellion, in many different guises, whether against outmoded traditions, oppressive authority, or the simple rebellion of the young against the old. Although the film concerns itself repeatedly with politics, and particularly the relationship of villages to the apparently predatory Malian state (with criticisms made in courageously pointed terms), the primary focus is on issues surrounding the treatment of women - first the problem of forced marriage (and remarriage) and then, in the final thirty minutes, the divisive issue of female circumcision. Sissoko makes a blunt analogy - repeated through the film - implying that the traditional views of women reduce them to mere livestock; at one point a woman is trussed up like a goat and thrown on top of a truck.

The film's narrative construction is filled with digressions and non sequiturs, that approximates, more obviously than most films from Africa, the rhythms and storytelling patterns of the oral tradition, while some of the characters have the vivid outlines of folk tale caricature (this is heightened by the fact that several of the actors employ an exaggerated style drawn from traditional Koteba theatre; the most obvious cinematic parallel might be with the buffoonish characters seen in Japanese samurai films, also based on the theatre). Aesthetically, the film is also notable for the almost complete lack of close-up shots, which, in Sissoko's telling, is designed to distinguish the film from the excessive American focus on the individual over the community; it might be seen as a contradictory choice given the fact that many of the individuals in the film have suffered from the adherence of the community to outmoded tradition.

La Vie sur terre

1998, Mali/Mauritania/France, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

Barely an hour long, Abderrahmane Sissako's first fiction feature is nonetheless a powerful window on the reality of (rural) African life that also functions as a fascinating commentary on the exile's view of his home. Sissako - an exile many times over who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, trained in Russia and who is now resident in France - takes an assignment to tell a story of Africa on the cusp of the millennium (part of a larger project funded by the TV station Arte) and subverts it entirely by illustrating the artificial and irrelevant nature of the transition to the inhabitants of Sokolo, a small town in Mali. In Sokolo, the only thing that signals the change from December 31 to January 1 is a report on the French radio channel RFI, along with reports on the winter weather in Europe.

Sissako's film marks something of a new direction in African film: he is not as obviously concerned by the burden of social responsibility borne by some of his predecessors, although his less didactic approach builds a slow, cumulative critique, while the film, like his subsequent Heremakono, is suffused with a sense of everyday visual poetry that is often mesmerising. He intercuts scenes from the life of the village - including constant attempts to connect with the outside world through an unreliable telephone system, as well as frequent scenes from the local radio station - with voiceovers that give life to his own thoughts, and in particular his concern, as expressed in a letter to his father, whether 'What I'm learning far from you is worth what I'm forgetting of us?' The film captures in amber much of what he worries about losing, and has an immediacy and directness that are quite disarming.

Bamako

2006, Mali/US/France, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

Although parts of Bamako recall, vividly, Abderrahmane Sissako's previous films La Vie sur terre and Heremakono in their focus on the details of daily life in Mali, the film as a whole seems almost without precedent: in a courtyard in the Malian capital, Bamako, Sissako creates an international tribunal that examines the impact of the World Bank and the IMF (in particular) on the economies of Africa, while all around the court daily life continues, and the residents of the compound pass in front of the judge. Those residents are the kind of people at the core of Sissako's past work, and his camera observes ordinary Malians with a simple, unpatronising gaze that allows us to appreciate each resident as an individual with a unique set of concerns. It's also critical to grounding a film that sometimes, of necessity, deals in larger abstractions such as the issue of debt on a continental scale, insistently returning the film to a recognisably human scale.

The film takes a clear, and highly critical, position on the role of the international monetary institutions, and the waves of testimony from ordinary people affected by 'structural adjustment' are a potent indictment of international policies - however well-intentioned they may have been, though some would contest even that assumption. Bamako doesn't provide any simple solutions, however: it's intended as a spark for debate rather than an end in itself. In the middle of the film there's a surreal sequence that involves a fictional spaghetti western, designed partly to indicate the complicity of at least some Africans in the fate of the continent, though it's an oblique reference that's not necessarily clear without being aware of the director's stated intent; similarly, the fact that the issue of corruption is addressed primarily by a defense advocate whose behaviour makes him occasionally buffoonish reduces the power of that critique.

The officers of the court are played by actual lawyers, while the witnesses are essentially portraying themselves or people of whose plight they are acutely aware (the second of the witnesses, for example, is Aminata Traoré, a former minister and political activist), and Sissako films them without interruption for the most part, allowing them to speak at length and as if the court was a real entity, with cross-examination and legal back-and-forth; while occasionally the individual sequences seem a little lengthy, the cumulative effect is powerful, while the closing arguments are mesmerizing (among other things, the film provides a fascinating insight into the French style of legal argument). While the lawyers, on both sides, have their fine arguments Sissako is also acutely concerned with those that have no voice: at the beginning of the film, an elderly man (Zegué Bamba) is shunted aside and asked to wait his turn, then returns later to deliver a heart-stopping sung lament that requires no translation. Perhaps even more poignant is the 'former teacher' - no doubt unemployed rather than retired - who comes to the witness stand and simply turns away, worn down by too many years of struggle that he's incapable of putting into words.