Bamako

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.

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).

I've been really surprised by this movie, It's not entertaining (narration mode very personal) and that's difficult to accept for many people.

This movie is an alert that things are going too far in Africa in general and in Mali in particular.

Intelligently done with many links and references to the international behavior in front of money and poverty. The glance through the cowboy movie or the interaction of the 'neighborhood' with the court to echo the speeches and how people believe in the 'trial'.

I do recommend this movie to give a chance to African film makers to raise their voice in front of the "collecting_money_at_all_costs" machine that became IMF or the World Bank

The film Bamako acts as a stylish docudrama covering the issue of the "African debt," along with other political turmoil, and daily Mali life in a quite brilliant marriage of the two in a storyline of a failing marriage coming to a close as a heated trial takes place in the courtyard outside of their home.

Watching the film, we witness a debate between parties over the accumulated debt owed to the World Bank, IMF, and other "foreign aid" and the subjugating and anti-progressive cycle, in which they are now stuck, taking place in a courtyard of Bamako, Mali. The people of the court consist of both actors and actual activists (a style of mixed film-making innovated by Werner Herzog and continually popularized by Harmony Korine). The trial, performed in the traditionally Western means of democracy, takes place in the midst of surviving African tradition and culture. Director Sissako further implements with increased power his argument against the discussed globalization with this reconciliation and at times even presents the hilarity of their coexistence (i.e. - the fact this is in a courtyard and not a courtroom, the elderly man who expects to be heard in his culture without permission to speak by a judge, the toddler's squeaking shoes sounding off throughout eloquent speeches).

One of the most interesting creative decisions of the film-making was the stylish inclusion of a film within the film, an ironic western starring Danny Glover, also a producer of the film, and Palestinian director Elia Suleiman. Here again Sissako makes multiple uses of an item, here with paralleling metaphors of pillaging bad guys as well as humorous parody of non-American westerns (popularized in Cambodia and Thailand (see Tears of the Black Tiger, a homage to Thai westerns in the 1950s), though I am unsure if this is truly a popular genre of Mali). Sissako has also admitted that he chose a multi-ethnic cast for the western in illustrating that it was not solely the West to be blamed for the troubles of Africa. I also see that many of the other users' comments show that they missed the intent of this scene, possibly because they don't expect such leveled humor from primitive Africa (racists!).

As a film geek, I could continue to shower the film in technical praise: the documentary style of filming adding a greater objectivity to the story, the beautiful shots like the man reclining beneath the rusty amplifier, sounding the song of the old man in court, the silent testimony of the schoolteacher, etc. However, I will stay objective in discussion of the film's politics. The film's points are clear. The foreign solution to poverty increased Mali's poverty due to privatization and lost government jobs. The foreign solution to its economic growth has hindered such growth by creating a structure dependent on exports and suffocating it with the accumulating interest of the debt. The sad excuse for a reduction of the debt is laughable as a solution. In other words, the cowboys were shooting aimlessly at nothing.