Films with: Keïta, Salif

Vie sur terre Life on earth /

A film about the significance of the start of the 21st Century for people still struggling to enter the 20th. Abderrahmane Sissako's solution was to improvise a 'fictional documentary' out of daily life in Sokolo, his father's village in Mali near the southeastern corner of Mauritania. He then overlaid these vignettes with readings from Aimé Césaire ... Behind all of this, he weaves the melancholy tones ["Folon"] of the great Malian tenor, Salif Keita and music by other artists.

DVD 1966

Yeelen Brightness /

A film adaptation of one of the great oral epics of the Bambara people, set during the powerful Mali Empire of the 13th century. Tells the story of Nianankoro, a young Bambara warrior destined to destroy a corrupt older society, the secret Komo cult, and with it his father, and, inevitably, himself. The climactic flash of light which floods the screen at the film's end ushers in a new purified world order and captures the Bambara belief in time as circular, not linear, always returning to that initial "brightness" which created the world.

DVD 5466