Bamako

Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

We’ve become so accustomed to the instant gratification of commercial media we may have forgotten that even movies have a ritualistic function. That’s the revelation of Mali director Abderrahmane Sissako’s new film Bamako. One of those African movies that work differently from ours, its purpose is not commercial but to serve as a form of local conversation. Indeed, its preaching-to-the-choir aspect is a slight drawback. Yet, sympathetic group communication is precisely Sissako’s subject. He shows villagers in Hamdallaye, the poorest section of Bamako, Mali’s capital city, putting on a show trial where the people are the plaintiffs and the defendants are those international global institutions the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the G8 conference.

Instead of Al Gore’s condescending lecture approach to cinema that rigs-together documentary footage, charts, figures and predictable slanted research, Sissako works as an artist. He lets “information” come from the mouths of the people—a combination of humanism and rhetoric. Although mock trials carry an unfortunate disturbing historical resonance, Bamako is best viewed as a reformist’s dream of what it would take to start global change. It turns the real-life premise of John Boorman’s underrated South African trial drama In My Country into agit-prop fantasy.

Each person, young or old, who steps before the microphone to give testimony displays a recognizably poignant impatience. Speaking out against post-colonial deprivations, they also address the nihilism that has infected their countrymen’s habits. Weaving trial scenes with street scenes, Sissako adopts an anecdotal style familiar from Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention. The protestors’ faces are beautiful and noble, and their accusations make a claim on our humanity. It makes you realize that when people in so-called sophisticated societies don’t even think to talk back directly to the institutions responsible for their well being, it’s probably one of the effects of seeing movies only as escapism.

Bamako exposes that “smart,” or overly developed, cultures no longer link movies to their everyday lives. The current trend is to scoff at the earnestness and nobility of Hollywood’s old socially-conscious movies (or new ones like In My Country). It’s easier to prefer Al Gore’s partisanship or the nullity of Children of Men as politically sophisticated when, actually, both are ways of avoiding humane identification. But it is through Bamako’s various testimonies that Sissako insists upon the inner lives of his witnesses.

These villagers want to know why their country and other African nations continue to be exploited by their Western colonizers. Given that urgent, heartfelt motivation, their trial—a political inquiry and moral examination—becomes the substance of Sissako’s film craft. Bamako’s structure combines cinema (the photographed observation of daily life) with folk forms of oration, testimony, hearings and TV/cinema. In one audacious aside, Sissako recreates the satellite broadcast of an action movie. It’s a western titled Death in Timbuktu which stars Danny Glover and Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman as gunslingers relocated from the American West to an African setting. They act-out the bloody impact of violent, corrupt Western culture. But Sissako’s deeper point is that even the simplest, most commercial forms of pop culture can be seen to have political roots, connections, causes and pretexts.

By specifying the public ritual of trial and protest, Bamako breaks through the cultural naivete that makes people think movies like Black Hawk Down, The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond (with the exception of Djimon Hounsou’s eloquent anguish) have anything to do with Africa. Sissako risks devolving into propaganda when a woman testifies: “This Africa, your Honor, is asking you with dignity, humility and modesty—but with legitimacy—for Justice. You must do Justice to Africa.” Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land, a family/national drama, made the same plea for Sri Lanka—and did it more poetically and less rhetorically—but, without the novelty of public ritual, nobody noticed.