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PostPosted: Tue Sep 30, 2014 4:31 pm 
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TOULOU KIKI, IBRAHIM AHMED, AND LAYLA WALET MOHAMED IN TIMBUKTU

Sissako's intimate, poetic look at the jihadist takeover in northern Mali

Abderrahmane Sissako, born in Mauritania and educated in Mali, is an African director whose concerns and outlook are broader and loftier than most. In Timbuktu, when he looks at the way the temporary jihadist takeover of northern Mali by the Ansar Dine group in 2012 quickly undermines the human dignity and way of life of the people, he does so with a surprising serenity that is at once poetic, gently ironic, ferocious, all-encompassing, and brave. Timbuktu is a political thriller with philosophical overtones and soaked in cultural awareness. The violence and devastation are here, but in a muted form that respects the dignity of the various victims and avoids demonizing the foreign invaders, who are, in the end, neighbors who've gone wrong. We see them up close. They are destroyers. They symbolically violate cultutural artifacts in the opening sequence, shooting up wooded statues. But they are also fallible and foolish. One of the Ansar Dine leaders Abdelkrim (Abel Jafri) is reminded by his son that he's not perfect: he can't learn to drive a truck properly. And they pose as Islamists, but can't speak Arabic properly either.

Timbuktu is a film of many languages. Tamasheq is spoken by the Tuareg Berbers, with their wrapped heads, quiet nomads living in tents. One of them, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), is a modest cattle and goat herder whose tragedy is at the center of the film. He tells the orphan boy Issam (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) whom he parents and who helps with the herding that the reason he's alive is that he's a musician, and not a warrior like Issam's father. Kidane's greatest joy in life is his daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and his relations with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki) are placid. Issam loses control while watering the cattle and a most prized cow, "GPS," damages the net of the fisherman Amadou, and in a rage Amadou spears GPS and she slowly dies.

This leads to a partly inadvertant act of violence by Kidane, and he falls into the custody of the jihadists and subject to their ruthless, arbitrary interpretation of sharia law. His wife had said they should move away to be closer to other people. His friends have. Others have been killed. Not it's too late. When he is "tried" by the jihadist elder (Salem Dendou) the conversation has to be translated back and forth between Tamasheq and the sometimes shaky Arabic of the Ansar Dine men. The Tuareg are pan-African people, ranging between Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso. Arabic too is of course a pan-national language, a much more widespread one. And yet the elegant Qur'anic Arabic of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif) is in quietly stark contrast to the jihadists' clumsy approximation. His words of disapproval over everything the jihadists do are couched in language that is a living reproach to these fools of God.

As in Sissako's Bamako, Timbuktu is choral, moving around among different people. There is the flamboyant eccentric woman Zabou (Kettly Noel), who wanders about. Her days of freedom are numbered as the jihadists bellow warnings over a loudspeaker in French and Bambara, the Malian language, that women must cover their heads and wear gloves -- an absurdity for a woman fishmonger -- and there is no music, no singing, no standing around outside: hardly anything is allowed. “We are the guardians of all deeds,” says one jihadist to the imam, wiping away the balance and logic of Islamic teachings. The jihadists try to make commitment videos but the younger ones lack real commitment and their effort is comically feeble. In a scene both beautiful and heartbreaking, boys forbidden to play football run around a playing field enthusiastically miming the game without a ball.

This is, fundamentally, a fable of despotic rule but set not in the bureaucratic mazes of Kafka or with the ironies of Nabokov but in a land of soft robes, yellow desert, sand hills and small lakes, a place of gentle ways and lovely music. Music hovers around, and the jihadists are tracking it down, finding four playing and singing at night. They're arrested and the singer, Fatou (Fatoumata Diawara), is sentenced to 40 lashes. This is a typical Sissako scene: Fatou draped in a black abaya, suffering and softly singing as she's whipped, tears pouring down her face. The sequence recalls the iconic poster image of the singer with tears streaming down her face in Bamako, but this is a film that's more "showing" than "telling," likely to appeal to some for being far less polemical than but quite as political and thought-provoking as the previous film. While Bamako was a remarkable ensemble piece, both serious and funny, Timbuktu has a memorable poetic beauty that suggests the already profound and thoughtful Sissako has reached another level of maturity.

Timbuktu, 97 mins., in Arabic, Bambara, French, English, Songhay, and Tamasheq, debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize. It has been selected as the Mauritanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. Though set in Mali it was filmed in Oualata, a town in south-east Mauritania. Sissako's starting point was a shocking video he saw of a couple being stoned to death for adultery by jihadists in Aguelhok, in eastern Mali, an incident he dramatizes and briefly glimpses here. Eighteen other international festivals are listed on IMDb. Theatrical release in France is set for 10 December. Release in Germany, Belgium, Norway, Portugal and the UK are also scheduled. In his eloquently admiring review Jay Weissberg of Variety predicted that "The film’s Cannes berth and critical acclaim will translate to strong Euro arthouse play with niche Stateside appeal." Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian's enthusiastic review has some interesting different angles.

Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. The film opens 10 Dec. 2014 in France, to excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2; though Cahiers du Cinéma reduced it to a cliché). US release 28 January 2015, New York (Lincoln Plaza Cinema & Film Forum) and Los Angeles; Feb. 2015 in Northern California. UK release 22 May 2015.


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ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO AT P&I Q&A [CK Photo]

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