Review of Timbuktu (2014) by Manny C — 21 Feb 2015

Another Oscar nominee for Foreign Language Feature, Abderrahmane Sissako's visually astonishing and morally devastating Timbuktu is set in only the most recent past, but it's definitely of the moment.

The setting is of course the sub-Saharan village in Mali, where Islamic fundamentalists took control in 2012 in an attempt to impose Sharia Law. The exotic locale, littered with mud huts and sand dunes, seems like a whole different planet, and the villagers who'd raised cattle and fished there for generations had to have felt like aliens were invading.

Wielding machine guns and bullhorns with vicious directives mostly aimed at women, the jihadists are shown to be hypocrites and thugs. The brutality is unspeakable. An unmarried couple is buried up to their necks and stoned; a women is sentence to 40 lashes for the crime of playing music, a sentence she endures with singing as she cries in pain.

Sissako, who hails from neighboring Mauritania, is looking to show not only the repressive face of Islam, but also the delicate culture that is being lost. The most powerful plot in the film centers on a cattle owner named Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed aka Pino), who lives quietly with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, but whose own sense of justice and anger come to light and result in tragic consequences.

But there is a moment in which Kidane sits and simply strums a guitar with his family as they sit under the stars, and we get a glimpse of the harmony about to be decimated. It's haunting, terrific filmmaking.