Bamana Films

[Asafo37]

YEELEN



Directed by Souleymane Cissé

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"Set in the powerful Mali Empire of the 13th century, Yeelen follows the journey of Nianankoro, a young warrior who must battle the powerful Komo cult. Nianankoro's greatest enemy is his own father, a dangerous and corrupt wizard who uses his dark magic to try and destroy his son. Traveling over the arid Bambara, Fulani and Dogan lands of ancient West Africa, Nianankoro eventually comes face to face with his father in a final fatal showdown." - http://www.kino.com/video/item.php?film_id=291

[Asafo37]

FINZAN



Director: Cheick Oumar Sissoko

"In Finzan, Cheick Oumar Sissoko has skillfully crafted a film which raises one of the most important issues of African rural life, the status of women, in a style accessible to every villager. Finzan tells the story of two women's rebellion. Nanyuma, a young widow defies her brother-in-law, the village fool, when he asserts his traditional right to "inherit" her. Fili, a young woman sent from the city by her conservative father, is brutally "circumcised" by village women, scandalized by her refusal to submit to this ancient ritual. Sissoko weaves these two stories together into a painfully realistic picture of village society, tragically unable to free itself from the past." - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.as...0033&s=bambara

[Asafo37]

TA DONA



Director: Adama Drabo

A Bambara proverb reminds us, "Everyone is in the hands of his mother." Ta Dona has been hailed as Africa's first environmental feature film because it outlines an authentically African development path - nurtured by tradition not abandoning it, cultivating the land and its people not plundering them.

In Ta Dona, director Adama Drabo deliberately mixes traditional and modern African modes of seeing - supernatural myth and naturalistic narrative. Like Souleymane Ciss�'s Yeelen, Ta Dona is the story of a quest for secret knowledge by a young hero, Sidy, a modern agronomist working for the Ministry of Rivers and Forests. It revisits a perennial African theme also at the center of Yeelen: the responsibility to use expert knowledge (traditional and now scientific) for the communal good not personal power.

Sidy, while living in a remote village, undertakes the search for a secret Bambara herbal remedy, the seventh canari, which has been forgotten except by an aged, childless mid-wife living in the Dogon country. Sidy's quest for the past represents a new kind of anthropology, not documenting an irretrievably alien culture, but rediscovering, reinvigorating and then developing one's own heritage.

Sidy exemplifies how the educated African elite can contribute to rural development in contrast to the corrupt class of African kleptocrats (ruler-thieves) who exploit rather than nurture their countries. The latter are exemplified by the local MP and father of Sidy's girlfriend, Samou Traore, (a thinly veiled reference to Malian dictator Moussa Traore.)

The film's title and central metaphor, fire, suggest that only revolutionary change can purify Malian society. In fact a month after the film's premiere in February 1991, a coup, brought about by protests in which more than 100 students were killed, overturned the 23 year dictatorship of Moussa Traore, leading to free elections." - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.as...0091&s=bambara

[Asafo37]

TAAFE FANGA



Producer/Director: Adama Drabo

Director Adama Drabo has devised a gender-bending farce set among the 18th Century Dogon to make some serious points about the status of women in Africa today.

This proleptic tale about a comic revolution in which women's and men's roles are reversed was, in part, inspired by the actual role women played in Mali's 1991 revolution. Drabo surprisingly found the germ for his domestic comedy from a program on Dogon mythology he heard over Malian radio. He then wrote a script which provides a stunning illustration of Marcel Griaule's observation that, "In the Dogon system of myth, social life must reflect the working of the universe, and conversely, the world order depends on the proper ordering of society." (Griaule, Marcel and Germaine Dieterlen 1954 "The Dogon", in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples, edited by Daryll Forde, P. 83.)

Therefore Taafe Fanga's story of sexual politics in a Dogon village necessarily involves the interpenetration of cosmogeny, history and the still unfolding present. The Dogon believe that all difference in the universe began with the splitting of the primal fonio seed into an ever-expanding spiral of space-time which can only be held together by a careful balancing or "twinning" of opposing energies. In Taafe Fanga, this tension reappears in the parallel stories of four women who challenge male supremacy among the Dogon's legendary elf-like andumbulu spirit ancestors; their semi-historical human descendants, the indigenous, cave-dwelling Tellem; the Dogon who invaded and massacred the Tellem in the 17th century (leaving them a place only in folklore and finally their present-day listeners to this tale.

Myth, storytelling and now film link past and future, as symbolized in the opening scene by the arrival of a traditionally robed griot at a contemporary urban compound. He flips off a television program (some fatuous Hollywood musical) and decides to tell a Dogon tale about the "battle between the sexes," when a proud woman pushes aside an arrogant young man to sit in the "men's section" of the courtyard.

Ambara, a village elder, impulsively decides to marry a younger woman because his wife, Timbe, hasn't gathered firewood to heat his bath. Her younger friend, Yay�m�, is beaten by her husband, Agro, when the other men accuse him of being "a woman's slave" for bringing home the firewood. An infuriated Yay�m� defies his warning about the evil andumbulus and sets off in the dark to forage for brush. There she encounters and overwhelms what she takes to be one of these bush spirits and makes off with its powerful mask.

Yay�m� has unwittingly stumbled onto the rare Sigi ritual, and has stolen the mask from a young Tellem woman, Yandju, who in turn has stolen the mask to protest women's exclusion from the ritual. The Dogon believed the Tellem held the Sigi ritual every 60 years to expiate the transgressions of their andumbulu forebearers. This woman who stole the earth's powerful raffia skirt, stained red with its menstrual blood or mud, thus brings death on her husband and all her descendants. In the Sigi ritual, (which women are still strictly forbidden to view) men dressed as women in these red fiber fertility skirts bind the dangerous spiritual energy unleashed by death which threatens to rip apart the normal spiral of life. The ceremony is presided over by the powerful Albarga mask which symbolizes social harmony and the proper balance between the sexes.

Timbe convinces Yay�m� that the mask has been sent by Anma, god of justice, in answer to her prayer for revenge against Ambara and all male arrogance. The next day Yay�m�, disguised in the mask, demands that the terrorized Dogon men from now on exchange roles with the women. Drabo exploits the full comedic possibilities of this "triumph of the skirts over the shorts" as the men prove predictably clumsy homemakers and are so exhausted by the end of the day they feign sleep to stave off their wives sexual advances. These scenes are met with uproarious responses from African audiences, because traditional gender roles remain largely unchanged.

The women soon recognize that their purpose was not simply to perpetuate gender stereotypes and injustice in reverse or to imbalance the world in the opposite direction. Timbe says: "Men and women are here to complement each other. Let's use our power now to bring equality among us. Let's share everything: work, happiness and misfortune." Later in a pointed reference to contemporary African development, Timbe points out that both sexes will be needed for an irrigation project which can again make the earth fertile: "The purpose of taking power is to make a better world...No nation is built without hard work - but it can't be done by excluding men" - or women.

In Taafe Fanga, Drabo has revised the Sigi myth (which seems originally to have expressed male anxiety over female control of fecundity) into a myth about women's right to resist patriarchy, in the griot's words, "to fight for the right to be different and equal. This film, along with Drabo's 1991 feature Ta Dona provide important examples of how contemporary African artists are freely reappropriating traditional belief systems to illuminate pressing social issues. - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.as...0092&s=bambara

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GUIMBA THE TYRANT



Producer/Director: Cheick Oumar Sissoko

Winner of the most prestigious award in African cinema, the Grand Prize at FESPACO '95, Guimba has been acclaimed as one of the most visually ravishing African films ever made. This epic allegory contrasts Africa's tremendous wealth and potential with its present poverty and plunder. Director Cheick Oumar Sissoko comments, "Guimba is a political film, a fable about power, its atrocities and its absurdities. I was personally influenced by what I experienced not long ago in Mali, but the ravages of power are, unfortunately, universal." The story has obvious parallels with the 1991 overthrow of Malian dictator Moussa Traore in which Sissoko was active.

Guimba tells the timeless tale of a tyrant's hubris and his downfall at the hands of his people, reminiscent of MacBeth or Richard III. The film's narrative embodies the process of revealing the truth from behind the facade of despotic power. For Guimba, the prince of a once prosperous trading city, the key to power is spectacle: humiliating court rituals, arbitrary displays of wrath, occult powers, even the terrifying mask which always covers his face. Guimba's authority begins to crumble when he demands that a nobleman divorce his wife so that his own son, the physical and moral dwarf, Jangin�, can marry her. This ludicrous demand reveals him to the townspeople as a unrestrained beast not a prince; they jeer and defy him and abandon the city to join a rebel force. Isolated, his magic powers exhausted, driven-mad, Guimba is left with no alternative but to commit suicide.

Guimba is thus a story of the restoration of truth and legitimate authority to Djenn�, the legendary city where the film was shot, and, allegorically, of democratic, "transparent" government to present-day Africa. In its opulence and epic scale, Guimba recalls and calls for the return of the continent's own former greatness and prosperity. Even, the film's striking costumes (themselves simultaneously veilings and statements) occasioned the revival of several traditional Malian textile crafts.

Sissoko notes that in Guimba he adapted to film two traditional Malian types of discourse used to "speak truth to power:" kot�ba, a popular form of satiric street theatre, and baro, a virtuoso kind of public oratory. Thus Sissoko creates through his film not just an allegory of present-day African politics but a community of viewers prepared to mock illicit power whatever its trappings. -http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.as...0043&s=bambara

[Asafo37]

KEITA: THE HERITAGE OF THE GRIOT



Director: Dani Kouyate

**In Djula

Keita creates a unique world where the West Africa of the 13th Century Sundjata Epic and the West Africa of today co-exist and interpenetrate. Director Dani Kouyat� frames his dramatization of the epic within the story of Mabo Ke�ta, contemporary boy from Burkina Faso, learning the history of his family. During the film, Mabo and his distant ancestor, Sundjata, engage in parallel quests to understand their destinies, to "know the meaning of their names." In so doing, Keita makes the case for an "Afrocentric" education, where African tradition, not an imported Western curricula is the necessary starting point for African development.

Both ancient and modern storylines are initiated by the mysterious appearance of a hunter, a passerby representing destiny who intervenes at strategic moments to propel Sundjata and Mabo on their journeys. The hunter both foretells the birth of Sundjata to the Mand� court and, eight centuries later, rouses Dj�liba (or Great Griot) Kouyat� to go to the city and initiate young Mabo into the secrets of his origin. The Kouyat�s have always served as the Ke�tas' griots, bards (jeli) belonging to a discrete Mand� caste or endogamous occupational group, who alone perform certain types of poetry and divination.

The griot's arrival creates tension in the Keita household especially between Mabo and his mother and his school-teacher, who stand for a Westernized lifestyle ignorant of African tradition. Mabo becomes so caught up in the griot's story that he stops studying for exams, day-dreams in class and eventually skips school to tell the story to other boys.

The film pointedly contrasts the moral depth of the griot's teachings with the sterile, culturally irrelevant facts which constitute Mabo's "Eurocentric" education. For example, the griot first comes upon Mabo while he is studying the Western "creation myth," Darwin's theory of evolution, of a universe ruled only by chance and the "survival of the fittest." In contrast, Mand� myth holds that human history is suffused with purpose and that every person has a particular destiny within it. By listening to The Sundjata Epic present-day Mand� listeners like Mabo can perceive the working out of destiny in history and see their own lives as part of a continuing narrative flow.

The Sundjata Epic, which Mabo hears recounts the life of Sundjata Keota (sometimes spelled Sundiata or Son-Jara Keyta,) the man responsible for turning his nation into the great Malian trading empire. Set in the early 13th century, the epic provides the wide-spread Mand� people a legend explaining their common origin and subsequent division into castes or clan families. An oral recitation of the complete poem with musical accompaniment can last close to sixty hours. But, this film, like most performances, recounts only a part of the epic, here the events surrounding the birth, boyhood and exile of Sundjata. (This corresponds to lines 356 to 1647 in the standard translation, Johnson, John William. The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.)

Sundjata's quest, like Mabo's, requires the successful reconciliation or integration of two types of power represented by his paternal and maternal lineages. His father, Maghan Kon Fatta Konati a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, has brought barika or law and progress to human society. In contrast, Sundjata's mother, Sogolon, and his grandmother, the Buffalo Woman of Do, rely on pre-Islamic occult powers or nyama. Their potentially disruptive effect on human civilization is symbolized by their habit of turning into ferocious animal "doubles."

Sundjata himself, hexed at birth by his mother's co-wife, must crawl across the earth, scorned as a "reptile." A Mand� proverb explains: "The great tree must first push its roots deep into the earth." When the climactic moment arrives for Sundjata to walk erect like a man, he tries to lift himself up with a seven-forged iron rod, symbolizing man-made technology. Even this cracks beneath his strength, so the hunter reappears and instructs Sogolon to fetch a supple branch of the sun sun tree which has the nyama to hold Sundjata's weight. Thus, the hero must harness natural and supernatural powers to fulfill his heroic destiny.

In the film's final scene, the griot disappears, and for the first time Mabo directly confronts the hunter; after hearing the epic, he is finally in touch with his destiny. At this point, the stories of the two Keotas intersect; history and legend, event and destiny have been brought into alignment. Indeed, in making this film, Dani Kouyat� (who shares the name of the griot) succeeds in fulfilling the "meaning of his name." He has used a quintessentially 20th century invention, motion pictures, to insure that The Sundjata Epic is passed on as an inspiring force in the lives of young Africans everywhere. - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0050&s=KEITA

[Asafo37]

FINYE




Director: Souleymane Cisse

Set in a small village community in contemporary Africa, Finye centers on a love affair between an army commander�s daughter and the grandson of a tribal chief. A spirited, sympathetic portrait of a society in transition, the film defines the director�s central philosophical premise: that the ethnographic approach or seemingly modern view of African culture is no more valid that the traditional metaphysical view. Myth and symbolism maintain an important role in Ciss�s films, where the frontier between realism and metaphor constantly shift. Here, he employs these multiple perspectives to present an intriguing study of a culture that is both exotic and unexpectedly familiar. - http://www.harvardfilmarchive.org/ca...dec/cisse.html

[Asafo37]

BAARA



The first feature film ever produced in Mail, Baara (The Porter) is about a young man caught in the growing political and economic tensions of urban Africa. Balla Diarra is a worker in the capital city of Bamako who struggles to survive on his meagar income. After his friend is murdered by an unfeeling factory boss, he must confront increasingly violent choices. Set in a modern city rather than a mythical past or traditional village, Baara offers a portrait of African life not often seen on the American screen.

[Asafo37]

SIA: THE MYTH OF THE PYTHON



Director: Dani Kouyate

Kombi is a poverty-stricken city dominated by a tyrant king. In order to bring back prosperity, the king is advised by his priests to make the traditional human sacrifice of a young virgin to a mystical snake god. Sia, the most beautiful young woman of the village, has been designated. Lieutenant Mamadi, her fianc�, rebels against the decision to perform this ritual and the village becomes divided. Struggles and revelations follow as the characters confront issues of honour, corruption and power. -http://www.africanfilm.com/sia.htm

[Revolutionary_Student]

Asante for this thread. I am a HUGE movie buff and I'm currently renting any and all movies dealing with revolution/Afrika and diaspora/oppression/politics and the like.

[Asafo37]

Si kitu Revolutionary Student! Glad you appreciate the films i hope you enjoy them.

Uhuru,
Asafo37

[Asafo37]

MOOLADE



By Ousmane Sembene

In the world of international cinema, there are still a few giants lumbering around. One of them is Ousmane Sembene, a writer, social activist, and film director from Senegal who practically founded African cinema, being the first to produce and direct independent films in the postcolonial era. Now, at over eighty years of age, he's created what is possibly his most powerful work: Moolaadé . It deals with the controversial practice of female circumcision -- a difficult and painful subject, but Sembene also expands the film's vision to include the plight of modern Africa itself.

In a village in Burkina Faso , as the ceremony of so-called purification approaches, four young girls who don't want to be cut run for sanctuary to a woman named Collé, known in the village as a rebel since she refused to have her own daughter cut in the ceremony. Collé invokes the tradition of "Moolaadé," a spell of protection which cannot be broken without incurring devastating retaliation by the spirits. Tying a string of colored yarn across the entrance to her home keeps the girls safe within the sanctuary and the angry village elders and ceremonial followers out.

The story, with its exploration of the power relations between men and women, is fascinating in itself. But Sembene also uses it to explore the whole fabric of village life, with its songs and rhythms and ambivalent relationship to the outside world, symbolized by the radios that the women love to listen to. This is not the usual Western-style film with dramatic pace -- we are gradually immersed, instead, through the collection of little details that eventually accumulate into a poetic world-view. The wide-screen composition and color give the picture a contemplative beauty even as the story's conflict becomes more and more intense. Sembene has a talent for letting a scene stretch out into its own natural rhythm. His non-professional actors seem thoroughly at home.

Collé is the second wife of a village elder -- her relationship with the first wife, which at first seems to be one of simple opposition, becomes humorously rich and complicated. In fact, each major character and relationship is given a chance to develop in interesting ways. A traveling merchant, known in the village as a ladies' man, reveals unexpected depths of character. Sembene also introduces a successful young man, the son of one of the village elders, engaged to Collé's daughter, who returns from Paris in his suit and tie. Here the film examines the uneasy intrusion of modernity into traditional life, with the conflict over genital mutilation played out indirectly in the contest for this young man's allegiance -- will he renounce his engagement to the girl who has not been cut? There is beauty in the old ways, but also ignorance and oppression, and the movie is wise enough to acknowledge both of these aspects.

By the time the issue of what will happen to the girls comes to a head, the viewer has become so involved in the life of this village that the outcome is fraught with tension. We get to witness how customs based on arbitray power hurt both victims and perpetrators. Moolaadé is provocative in the best sense, giving all sides their due before resolving things in a courageous display of solidarity. -http://www.cinescene.com/dash/moolade.htm

[Asafo37]

KOUNANDI



Director: Apolline Traore, Producer:Idrissa Ouedraogo

**In Djula

The award-winning Kounandi is that rarest of films – a film about African women by an African woman. It is the first major film by young Burkinabe director Apolline Traoré and was produced by celebrated director Idrissa Ouedraogo. The film makes a significant contribution to the tendency in African filmmaking, identified by Manthia Diawara as “a return to the sources.� These films, characteristically set in simpler, pre-colonial village society, are told in the style of folktales. Kounandi is an adult fairy tale about love and the sacrifices it sometimes asks of us, but it also dares to address social conflict and prejudices.

Kounandi’s biological mother, a stranger to the village, dies in childbirth. The infant is named Kounandi, or “one who brings luck�, by the village chief and is adopted by Miriam and Moussa, an unhappy childless couple. Kounandi’s name becomes ironic because in adulthood she is a dwarf, traditionally regarded as a symbol of bad luck. Yet, Miriam and Kounandi develop a close relationship, especially since the impotent, insecure and drunken Moussa is abusive to both of them. When the frustrated Miriam has an affair and prepares to leave the household with her boyfriend and Kounandi, Moussa shoots his wife. Kounandi is left homeless when Moussa evicts her from his compound.

She is befriended by a handsome young man, Karim, who builds a miniature house for her behind his own. She earns her living making delicious cup cakes with a cast iron pan, the sole legacy of her birth mother. Naturally she falls in love with Karim only to discover that he is married to the sickly Awa who is away being attended to by a healer. When Awa returns she is jealous of Kounandi and tries to make cakes herself but hers are inedible. Awa’s health continues to deteriorate and Karim is inconsolable. Then one night Awa and Kounandi meet before the sacred baobab tree; a bolt of lightening strikes. The next morning Kounandi is found in her house serenely laid out in death while Awa has been restored to perfect health; later even her cakes take on Kounandi’s culinary magic.

From the point of view of “political correctness� the sacrifice of the “tragic� dwarf to the happiness of average sized people may seem somewhat problematic - even more so because Awa “inherits� Kounandi’s good health. In any case, the story’s end makes perfect sense in the structure of the fairy tale; it restores the status quo, the dyadic marital unit, a happy couple - and a wife who can even cook. - http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0158&s=jula

[Duku]

Thanks for the extensive list. Have seen some of these and will surely pursue seeing them all.

[Asafo37]

Don't mention it! Blacktastic!!