“Timbuktu” of Sissako on French screens … but not in Mali – Journal of Mali.com

The curiosity is great for the film, which was screened last May at the Cannes festival, but which arouses criticism in Mali. If knighted by the French critics, the work “Timbuktu” has unfortunately received no awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless on the eve of the film’s release on French screens, Sissako, Mauritania’s director of Malian adoption was the whole day on Tuesday, the special guest of RFI, which devoted its antennas …

To return to this film that dives a few months back in the throes of the jihadist occupation in 2012 in northern Mali, a news passed almost unnoticed, Sissako says the journalist Emmanuel Bastide. The stoning of a couple, tried adultery, since not married to Aguel’hok. “This story was quickly forgotten, almost no media coverage,” laments Sissako, which has made the starting point of his fiction. Another scene lighthouse, one of the gazelle gallop, chased by jihadist with a pickup. And it ends badly because of a cow that has tripped over a fishing net –

To see the trailer, the first pictures are beautiful, intense colors, shapes suggested in through the fabric of these chaste women from the north which one of them asks a jihadist, who came to take a night tour. “Why do you come to me while my husband is not there? What do you want? If you see bothers you, then do not look at me,” joked it on to the oppressor who wants to see Covered from head to foot, the risk of being stoned to death.

So “Timbuktu” evokes these buried pain, the trauma in eight months, but the resistance of the inhabitants of Timbuktu face obscurantism .dropoff window With his camera, Abderrahmane Sissako, questions such prohibitions imposed and that “Islam truncated” in the name of jihad or sharia claimed a day on the universal values ​​of peace and tolerance has always advocated the true Islam since the time of Muhammad (PBUH).

With players deep play, Sissako filmed with modesty and discretion, as he confided himself, the ordinary life people face intolerance to incomprehensible. It reveals the infinite desert, ocher sand, secret alleys of Timbuktu, images that cause the slow, deep … and thinking …

Filmed near the Malian border in a red zone in the far eastern Mauritania, Timbuktu only tells one but several stories and chronicles, which today can never be forgotten by those who lived it. The most absurd occupation. A fiction that can open avenues for victims and push to talk, to finally tell what happened in the city of 333 saints …

If French citizens and before them critics in Cannes, will have had the chance to see the film, it would have been appreciated the director, a projection in Bamako before that on French screens. But that’s another debate …