Bamako

This film is set in a small courtyard in the Malian capital, Bamako. A trial is taking place; on the one side those representing the ordinary people of Africa on the other those representing the organisations they hold responsible for the national debts that keep the people impoverished. While the trial progresses we meet various characters; some are witnesses others are ordinary people going about their lives.

This is an interesting film even though we know such a trial would never take place and if it did it wouldn't be in a public courtyard... that isn't really a problem though. The case raises some important issues about how African nations are treated however it does feel too polemic at times; this is especially the case when a French lawyer rails against the World Bank, the IMF and the west in general towards the end... the earlier more personal testimonies from affected Africans felt far more relevant. I liked the little details away from the details of the trail; a policeman has his gun stolen while he had a nap; a singer plans to move to Senegal and locals watch 'Death in Timbuktu', a pseudo-spaghetti western starring Danny Glover... this section was particularly inventive as we switch to watching this film within the film for several minutes. Overall I'd say this was fairly interesting but I felt it would have been more interesting if we'd seen more of people's ordinary lives and a little less of the trial.

It is impossible to resist this little innocent beauty of a movie. The heartbreak of today's Africa is overwhelming. Wars, violence, immense poverty, AIDS and perhaps the worst of all, hopelessness. There doesn't seem to be a light at the end of a tunnel. " Bamako" is a very unusual movie. Even its description is inaccurate. The mock trial of the World Bank, IMF and other immoral bloodsuckers takes the most of the movie. Little personal tragedy of Mele and Chaka brought upon by the despair of the everyday Mali, is unfortunately just a sideline, never fully explained or told. Because of that this powerful movie seems more like a documentary or a political tirade.

Bamako is more a PBS special than a flat out film. It chronicles a trial in which the World Bank is on trial itself. The film is quite anti Bush-era corporate interests (IMF, World Bank, and G8 are among the villains name-checked), but through the film (I don't even know what it is, a doc. or a film) comes the film maker's true anger which is surprisingly stimulated. In between the quasi-entertaining court-room arguments and the callous shots of town, there isn't much room to inhale pure film making. (There's even a bizarre mock-movie staring Danny Glover as in assassin in a haphazard African town.) And yet, despite the film's slog, there's something in Bamako that keeps it quietly vital, making it a true case of moral politics but pretty much a slog of a film.

I'm hardly an expert on African economics, or social life, but this story whose political viewpoint is clearly African does what I think a movie should: it presents both sides of an issue -- in this case Mali's financial struggle and whether the World Bank and IMF should be blamed for the distress of the people.

Through a story that revolves around a court case, we see the stories of struggle of a wide range of people: mother, educator, escapee, unemployed person, and the average guy trying to make ends meet but having a difficult time.

For me, it clarified some of the issues and effects of fairly extreme poverty and lack of government prioritization for social services, health and education. It made the argument that a government may be at fault for selling out the country's future at the expense of developing a stronger base.

The bleakness, however does something bigger, or I hope it does -- I hope it gives strength to continue to fight as the producers, I think, would like.

See this. Africa is an important piece of the world and an important piece of the globalization of the world.

As recently as Ousmane Sembene's 2004 Moolaadé we saw a sort of African town meeting: such spirited democratic palavers are a feature of African local life. In Bamako, also known as The Court, Sisako has staged a mock trial of the IMF, the World Bank, and the other international financial institutions run by the rich countries that have perhaps contributed to the impoverishment and demographic ravaging of contemporary Africa more than they have helped the continent. This event takes place in the middle of a big busy square in a section of the capital of Mali, Bamako.

There is a whole panoply of characters – a beautiful queen bee (an example of the grace and poise of African women), Melé (Aissa Maiga) and her husband Chaka (Tiecoura Traore). Melé's a popular singer whose marriage is disintegrating and two of her spirited songs are integrated into the film. People watch TV, and the director ironically injects into his film a "western" set in Timbukto, in which incongruous white men as well as Palestinian director Elia Suleiman and Bamako's producer Danny Glover shoot each other. The effect is grotesque, but that's the point: why should Africans be watching TV westerns? Elsewhere on the earthy "set" of the film there's a young man, also beautiful, who lies dying inside a nearby building with no medical care. There are many children, some playing about, some being breast-fed. A couple marry, and the festivities interrupt the trial. There's a flinty gatekeeper who decides who can come in and who can't. There's a traditional griot who's one of the "witnesses" and who ends the proceedings with a hypnotic chant (not translated, but strangely stirring and stunning). There's another "witness" – a former schoolteacher – so hopelessly demoralized he refuses to utter a word; a sound recordist; a video photographer who says he prefers to take pictures of the dead because they're more real; and many authentic-looking extras, including a variety of dried-up tough young-old (or ageless) stick-men, all of them coming and going.

You get a vivid sense from all this, which is rhythmically inter-cut with the trial itself, of the harmonious seeming chaos of African village life; the color, the beauty and dignity of the people. You get above all a sense that life goes on. There are two white men on the "stage" of the trial, one an advocate for the international organizations (Roland Rappoport) and the other (William Bourdon) eloquently speaking for the African people and for socialism who concludes that the first world should be sentenced "to community service" "forever." Eloquent though he is, a Malian woman lawyer who speaks after him (Aissata Tall Sall) is more touching.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, Bamako's trial presents facts and arguments of enormous present day importance – this time surrounding not global warming and the disintegration of the earth's eco-system, but another set of the planet's major problems: the social imbalances, the domination of the many by the few; poverty and disease, "terrorism" used to excuse world domination, the richest nations' doing harm while seeming to do good; the ravages of globalization, the privatization of natural resources down to land and water, perhaps ultimately to air; the national debts of poor nations collected by the economic organizations of the rich ones, and thereby preventing the poor ones from gaining any ground against the ravages of poverty and underdevelopment. .

This is powerful stuff. Sisako is, in theory, presenting both sides of the story, though it is obviously which side he is on and which side is in the majority on screen. This is polemic. The international organizations obviously aren't overtly setting out to destroy Africa – are they? It is preaching; but it is done in a rich and colorful and dramatically moving way. The film picked up a US distributor during the New York Film Festival. It's not clear whether the way the print was presented was accurate. This seemed to be a projection of a digital copy that lost the surface beauty of the original. The colors of Jacques Besse's photography were beautiful, but dimmed. In French and Bambara (the Malian language).