Timbuktu

Timbuktu (12A)

France/Mauritania 2014 96 mins Dir: Abderrahmane Sissako Cast: Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pino, Abel Jafri, Toulou Kiki

Juxtaposing images both beautiful and brutal to craft a quietly wondrous meditation on human existence, Timbuktu is one of the year’s finest movies. The third movie from director Abderrahmane Sissako, the fact-based film stares a difficult subject in the face – the encroaching danger of jihadism in the eponymous African city – and yet is able to balance its disturbing elements with a surprising amount of joy, humour and compassion.

Sissako has in the past proved himself a master at evoking a patient yet profound sense of atmosphere and there’s nothing to go against that here, off-setting the implacable nature of the African landscapes with the savagery of the human conflicts contained within. The film starts with a group of terrorists hunting a gazelle whilst armed with machine guns, a striking start and an image that ultimately comes to sum up the fragility of not just nature but also human relationships.

Set in 2012 and taking place in a rural village just outside Timbuktu, the story revolves around a clutch of characters on both sides of the moral divide, some villagers, others jihadists. They include Islamist terrorist Abdelkerim (Abel Jafri), one of many men aggressively bearing the flag of ISIL who have steadily encroached on the country of Mali in the fallout from the Arab Spring. Abdelkerim and his men demand that women wear gloves, even when preparing fish at the market, they actively prevent the locals playing football, and in one horrifying sequence, are seen stoning to death a woman who was caught listening to music in the company of men without wearing her traditional dress.

Yet this barbarism sits alongside rich oases of compassion. Whilst we see what Abdelkerim and his compatriots are capable of, we also witness his shyness in front  of his driver when he attempts to disguise his smoking habit. Further humanity bubbles up from the movie’s central focus on cattle farmer Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), whose conflict with a fisherman over his livestock leads to tragedy. Throughout, Sissako turns the human face into a thing of wonder, the eyes of Kidane’s wife Satima (Toulou Kiki) in particular acting as deep whirlpools of emotion.

This is where the film is so brilliant: it has its eyes on the wider political context, although it’s never so crude as to labour the message, and also the more intimate, poetic details. One unexpectedly humorous moment even sees a group of the jihadists arguing about the merits of Lionel Messi’s footballing skills. It’s an amusing conversation that not only humanises those who are glibly demonised by the media, but which also contrasts with perhaps the film’s most extraordinary sequence: a football game in which a group of boys are forced to play with an imaginary ball, the real one having been confiscated.

It’s moments like these that Sissako shows an unparalleled ability to convey incredibly complex information primarily through his visual artistry. That’s not to say there isn’t dialogue: the varying dialects of the landscape in which the film takes place provide elements of culture clash amusement and also serve to emphasise the disconnect felt in an increasingly divided world. But by the time the film reaches its unsettling, open-ended conclusion, what really impresses is how Sissako brings to life a period that has been shamefully overlooked, at least in Western culture, with as little expositionary lecturing as possible.