“Timbuktu” Mali my love – Paris Match

Timbuktu is silenced, closed doors, deserted streets. More music, more football, no cigarette. No more bright colors and laughter, women are only shadows. Religious extremists sowing terror. Far from the chaos on the dunes, Kidane leads a quiet life with his wife, daughter and her little Issan shepherd. His tranquility was short-lived. Accidentally killing Amadou the fisherman who attacked his favorite cow, Kidane faces the law of the occupants hostage taking an open and tolerant Islam. Face humiliation and abuse perpetrated by men with multiple facets, “Timbuktu” tells the silent and dignified fighting men and women, the uncertain future of children and the race for life …

Critical

We have seen nothing of Timbuktu. Neither ordinary violence of everyday life. Neither the pain of these men and women face the Islamist totalitarianism. We have seen nothing of the war in Mali. Neither the obvious swagger of these terrorists who wanted to impose Sharia law and women take to the Malian beauties who refused their machismo backward nor pacifist struggle proponents of moderate Islam to end the prohibitions and spoils of war. Abderrahmane Sissako, he has seen and heard the suffering of a people who has a caved times but never stopped living. “Timbuktu” is sometimes awkward in his desire to interweave several stories in the great history, but it is a poetic and cinematic response to barbarism, a strong artistic gesture recreation of evil to better avert it. When the laughter of the absurd is invited to the stupidity of the executioners, we sometimes think of the cinema of Elia Suleiman (“Divine Intervention”), also mentioned in the credi ts, with that same reflex to resist occupation humor and derision.

There are beautiful scenes in “Le Courage des oiseaux” provisionally the project, which fit him like a glove: adolescents who play without the ball on a football field, a young man who knows very well why he does jihad, facing camera, a family of shepherds who sings tenderly in a tent. “We must not repeat, but my dad sings and plays guitar,” says the girl to one who keeps cattle herd secret to keep for that fathers do not die in the war. Despite the tears and lashes, injustice and stone throwing, nothing will prevent the Malian people to sing his life and destiny.

Our interview with the producer Sylvie Pialat

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