<http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/movies/14bama.html> February 14, 2007 MOVIE REVIEW | 'BAMAKO' World Bank in the Docket, Charged With Africa's Woes By A. O. SCOTT
I have never seen a film quite like "Bamako," Abderrahmane Sissako's seething, complicated and disarmingly beautiful investigation of Africa's social, economic and human crises. The agony of Africa has been explored, and exploited, in several high-profile recent documentaries and fictional features, from "God Grew Tired of Us," about the "lost boys" of Sudan, to "Blood Diamond" and "The Constant Gardener." "Bamako" is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.
Mr. Sissako, a Malian director whose previous films include "Life on Earth" and "Waiting for Happiness," does not try to engage the pity of the audience through sad stories or terrible images. Rather, he tackles the central question of the film — have the ostensible good intentions of the West, in particular the World Bank and similar institutions, contributed to the impoverishment and demoralization of the continent? — calmly and systematically, though with evident passion.
His conceit is at once simple and daring, straightforward and more than a little surreal. In a courtyard in a poor section of Bamako, Mali's capital, magistrates in robes sit at a table, taking notes and shuffling through files as they listen to testimony from witnesses and advocates. On trial is not a person but the World Bank — which is to say, global capitalism — itself.
Since Mali, a former French colony, follows French judicial customs, and since the French language is well suited to abstraction, the arguments are not always strictly empirical. Allegations of conspiracy are challenged with demands for proof, but the most eloquent testimony comes in the patient, angry speeches of ordinary Africans who step forward to lament what they see as the cruel consequences of debt servicing and privatization: emigration, loss of control over infrastructure and natural resources, rampant political corruption and a precipitously declining standard of living.
Some of the judges are black, some white, and the two teams of lawyers are also mixed, perhaps to suggest that the stakes in the trial cannot simply be reduced to Africa versus the West. Much of the prosecution's oratory may be provocative to Western ears, and may call forth counterarguments. Surely the misrule and war that menace so much of the continent are not solely the fault of foreign powers and institutions.
But such provocation seems to be part of Mr. Sissako's project. He wants the discussion of Africa, which has frequently been conducted in terms established in Washington, London, Paris and Brussels, to include African voices, and not only those of the local elite. He also insists — by means of his visual techniques as much as through the words of his characters — that the central human facts of the situation cannot be ignored.
Like "An Inconvenient Truth," "Bamako" can be described as didactic, which simply means that it overtly tries to use film to teach. But there is also another dimension to the movie, an attention to the details of daily life in Bamako that lends it extraordinary richness and gravity. As the lawyers press forward with their eloquence — occasionally showboating or lapsing into procedural pettifoggery — the camera wanders through the courtyard and beyond, taking note of the small interactions between men and women, the old and the young, the busy and the idle. People work, read, chat and doze. They listen intently to the trial, which is broadcast over loudspeakers, or else they go about their routines as the speeches play like background music.
An oblique, delicate and sad story also threads its way quietly through "Bamako," concerning a singer named Melé (Aïssa Maïga); her husband, Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré); and their young daughter. While their destinies are linked with the themes under consideration in the trial, these characters are not so much symbols or ciphers as reminders of the almost incomprehensible gulf between the general and the particular.
A less confident, more facile director might have tried to force a connection between macroeconomics and a single family's plight, but Mr. Sissako's sensibility is too subtle for such shortcuts. Melé and Chaka are beautiful and dignified; Ms. Maïga's face and carriage make you grateful for the existence of cinema. But they are hardly the noble, suffering Africans of well-intentioned Hollywood caricature.
Not that subtlety is everything. Mr. Sissako is trying to make a point, and to use whatever cinematic means he has at hand to bring it home. The most striking of these is a film within the film, a mock-spaghetti western starring Danny Glover and the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman that turns the prosecution's brief into a bloody allegory. If you saw gunmen killing women and children on the street, or executing schoolteachers because there were too many, you would be appalled and enraged.
Those are Mr. Sissako's sentiments exactly, and his ability to channel them into a fierce and unforgettable piece of political art makes "Bamako" necessary viewing.
BAMAKO
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written (in French and Bambara, with English subtitles) and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako; director of photography, Jacques Besse; edited by Nadia Ben Rachid; production designer, Mahamadou Kouyaté; produced by Denis Freyd and Mr. Sissako; released by New Yorker Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Aïssa Maïga (Melé), Tiécoura Traoré (Chaka), Hélène Diarra (Saramba), Habib Dembélé (Falaï), Djénéba Koné (Chaka's Sister), Hamadoun Kassogué (Journalist) and Hamèye Mahalmadane (Presiding Judge).
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/movies/11denn.html> February 11, 2007 One Angry African Puts Big Money on Trial By DENNIS LIM
ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands
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"Through art you can invent the impossible." Mr. [Abderrahmane] Sissako, 45, said in an interview here at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, where he was the subject of a retrospective. "It's obviously an improbable scenario: to put on trial these two institutions that nobody can hold accountable. But that's the point. In this little courtyard we make the impossible possible."
To staff the tribunal in "Bamako," Mr. Sissako sought out real judges and lawyers, whom he armed with extensive research material. He also assembled a cross section of witnesses, from childhood friends to a former minister of culture, all appearing as themselves.
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The primary setting of "Bamako" holds great significance for Mr. Sissako, whose work often incorporates elements of autobiography. "I couldn't have made a film like this in just any courtyard," he said. "It had to be this one, where I grew up. Shooting there I felt protected. I felt I was allowed to make mistakes."
Thanks to Mr. Sissako's father, an engineer, there was always a bustling communal atmosphere at the compound. "My father was the only one in his family who went to school," he said. "He felt a responsibility to take in the children of relatives and friends who were less well off. Usually there would be about 30 people in the house." The courtyard, he said, "is Malian society in miniature."
Mr. Sissako was born in Mauritania but grew up in Mali, his father's home country. As a teenager he bristled against the oppressive school system. "I was never a good student, and I started to get militant ideas because I wanted to overthrow the school," he said.
His revolutionary views grew more focused when he encountered the writings of Che Guevara, African-American civil rights activists like W. E. B. Dubois, and anticolonialist authors like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. He was also galvanized by the global anti-apartheid movement and caught up in a growing resentment toward the military dictatorship in Mali. By his late teens he was organizing student strikes. "It was a dangerous time," he said. "Friends of mine were in prison. One was dead."
At 19, he moved to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, where his mother was living. Homesick for Mali, unfamiliar with the local dialect, he found unexpected solace at the Soviet cultural center, where he spent his days playing table tennis, learning Russian and reading Dostoevsky. He ended up at the prestigious film academy in Moscow. After nearly a decade there he moved to Paris in the early 1990s. His nomadic existence strongly informed his worldview. He found his voice as a poet of displacement, forever grappling with the bafflement of exile and the sorrow of the impossible return.
In "Waiting for Happiness" (2002), set in a Mauritanian coastal town that functions as a way station between Africa and the West, one of the characters is an alienated young man visiting his mother before he leaves for Europe. In "Life on Earth" (1998) Mr. Sissako plays a version of himself, an expatriate returning from Paris to Mali on the eve of the millennium. One line in that film, from a letter that the young man writes to his father, sums up the ambivalent yearning at the heart of his work: "Is what I learn far from you worth what I forget about us?" (Both films were shown at the New York Film Festival. New Yorker Films will release "Waiting for Happiness" on DVD later this year.)
The overtly political "Bamako" represents a move away from autobiography. "I was getting tired of drawing on my own life," Mr. Sissako said. "There's a natural end to that process."
But the explicit subject of "Bamako" had been the implicit themes of his other films: the legacy of colonialism and the lopsided relationship between the first and third worlds. Even more than the average courtroom procedural, it is a film about the power of the spoken word, giving voice to those normally denied that privilege.
It also, however, demonstrates the limits of language. Called to the stand, one of the witnesses finds himself unable to speak. "Truth cannot always be expressed in words," Mr. Sissako said. "It can also be silent, and you cannot say no to those who are silent."
In the movie's emotional climax, another witness forgoes conventional testimony and sings a full-throated lament. The scene is left unsubtitled, but the sentiments could not be clearer. "He was singing in a dialect from the south of Mali," Mr. Sissako said. "Even most of the people in the courtyard didn't understand it, but we were all very moved."
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The African group of the International Monetary Fund has seen it, Mr. Sissako said, but he has yet to receive any feedback. Last month he showed his film in Bamako, in front of the courtyard where it was shot. Thousands turned up. Still, insofar as the movie is a broadside, its designated audience is a Western one. Mr. Sissako recalled the advice of an old friend, a Malian judge: "He told me, 'Don't think this film will change anything. But you have to make it. Perhaps then they will know that we know.'"
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>