Waati

This film, which has been shown twice in France on the Arte channel but is, I believe, not available on video, is one of the most impressive films from one of the francophonic world's greatest directors. Beginning in South Africa under the apartheid regime, it follows a young girl who flees the country after a violent confrontation with a local white landowner in which her father is killed. She settles in Abidjan, where, ten years later, she has become a university student. As part of her studies, she visits the Taureg tribe on the edge of the Sahara before at last returning to post-Apartheid South Africa. This is a vastly ambitious film, attempting as it does to deal with a number of cultures and countries of contemporary Africa, each with its own history, language, and political and social conflicts. At its center are two immensely impressive performances by the actresses who play the heroine, first as a young girl, and later as an adult. Thus it manages to be at once an intimate portrait of a young woman, and a vast fresco of much of a continent.

I just saw this film in Bamako; Souleymane Cissé was there, as were a few of the child actors from the film. This is the only film I've seen by him; as he is generally rated the greatest film director in Africa, I had high hopes.

I thought the film was terrible. The characters were cardboard-cutout stereotypes. The plot was ridiculous and made no sense. The dialogue (what little of it there was) sounded false. As a previous reviewer says, he tried to "address" a lot of issues, but he failed to give anything but a predictable and brief look at any of them. The overall effect is like one of those terrible "political" songs that most African rap or reggae stars feel obliged to record, where they clumsily try to cram big French words into the music.

The cinematography was very nice, I should say, but a little overdone, in the French style: shots of beautiful scenery that just go on a little to long.

It's a shame that so many people feel obliged to cut M. Cissé so much slack, I suppose because there just aren't that many African film directors.