Timbuktu

Film (2014)

With Ibrahim Ahmed (Kidane), Toulou Kiki (Satima), Layla Walet Mohamed (Toya), Mehdi A.G. Mohamed (Issan), Abel Jafri (Abdelkerim), Hichem Yacoubi (Djihadiste), Kettly Noël (Zabou), Fatoumata Diawara (La chanteuse), Adel Mahmoud Cherif (L’Imam), Salem Dendou (Le chef djihadiste)

A cattle herder, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), his wife, Satima (Toulou Kiki) and young daughter, Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed) are at the center of this devastating story of imposed religious autocracy and violence in West Africa.

Musicians are stoned, marriages imposed, soccer forbidden, all by those who come to establish authority with a ruthless interpretation of religious law and a constant threat of retribution for violating it.

This nominee for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year is a thoughtfully executed reflection of the horrors of jihad set in the Timbuktu region of Mali, West Africa.

A quietly unfolded depiction of village life interleaves with the violently self-justified intrusions of the jihadists at ever turn. This rhythm of placidity and violence effectively constructs a poetically fierce indictment of imposed trauma parading under the banner of religious enforcement.

Nonetheless, it gives its villains as human a face as possible, demonstrating, even with the smoking of a forbidden cigarette by one of them, how inconsistent and frail the application of authoritarian judgement can be. This sense of the ordinariness of the jihadists makes the intrusion, the violence and the horrible effects even more chilling.

Not depicted as monsters but as sincere and dutiful mediocrities makes them that much more frightening. Whether or not one agrees with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) of Nazis as mediocrities, there is something compelling about that idea here. One watches these sincere, but limited, men executing judgments based on rigid principles without thoughtfulness or insight. They give the appearance of reflective judgement, but, in truth, they merely parrot rigid interpretations of the dictates. Not depicted as horrific, they exhibit the true horrors of this insidious misapplication of religious ideas that much more effectively.

One of the scenes of forbidden music playing is played and sung particularly beautifully. One is swept up in the richness of the plaintive voice and the roughly hewn but rhythmic strummings of the guitar. When the harsh judgement comes after the tracking of the outlawed practice of playing and singing, it strikes to the heart. The punishment applied is ruthless and devastating, depicted vividly and directly.

Looking, longing, staring into the distance, Satima exhibits a great nobility, a sense of the natural grace of these lives unencumbered by this sort of horrific intrusion. Toya, a lovely, vital thirteen year old, prances across the dunes, expressing life through each gaze and step, driven ultimately to run from home towards the site of great calamity.

When a soccer ball is forced away by this supposedly religious dictate, a virtual game, without a ball unfolds, a poetic testament by the director to the hidden, unrestrainable rhythms of village life which endure through the trials of conquest and the application of unjust regulations. It is at once whimsical and deeply significant.

Zabou (Kettly Noël), a seemingly crazy woman bedecked in glorious rags presumably has come from Haiti after the devastating earthquake. In the middle of the ideologically imposed human disaster that this village in Timbuktu endures, her loopiness appears entirely sane. Under the circumstances, appearing to lose one’s mind is a far rational alternative than taking in the horrifically imposed applications of misconstrued religiosity.

– BADMan