Opening a door to African cinema

BY GENE SEYMOUR | Newsday Staff Writer

October 11, 2006

Set in Mali, "Bamako" stars Aissa Maiga as a nightclub singer

For decades, African cinema has been poised for the kind of international breakthrough that Asian and Middle Eastern films have enjoyed. There are lots of stories to be told and there have been directors willing and able to tell them, but the financial resources available to filmmakers on other continents aren't within easy reach of their African counterparts. So the breakthrough remains out of reach.

Still, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has always kept its eyes and ears open for the best and most provocative African films. And this year's 44th edition of the society's New York Film Festival has found a distinctive gem with "Bamako" by Abderrahmane Sissako, a Mauritanian-born director who made his first splash at the 2002 New York festival with his haunting debut feature, "Waiting for Happiness."

Sissako's follow-up has so many disparate elements that you're amazed at how they meld into one acerbic, potent statement. Set in Mali, "Bamako" starts out as an account of a troubled marriage between a stoic villager and his nightclub-singer spouse.

As such intimate drama plays itself out, a tribunal takes place in the courtyard of the couple's home in which white-wigged lawyers representing the African people prosecute the World Bank and its International Monetary Fund for carrying out policies that leave the continent relatively impoverished.

At one point, a village family is shown watching Danny Glover, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman and Sissako on television in a spot-on, cannily anachronistic parody of "spaghetti westerns." This antic digression, too, has points to make about the global economy's benign neglect of Africa.

It shouldn't work, but it does. Even if you consider the trial sequences to be preachy, you have to concede that they're preaching about issues that rarely, if ever, get aired to mass audiences, especially in the West. And the poet in Sissako can't help but let lyricism seep into his trial, through the riveting testimony, in chanting and song, of a poor farmer.

"Bamako" has finished its New York festival run and has found an American distributor, New Yorker Films, though no release date's been announced.

Among the movies on tap for this week is "Climates," by the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Slated for Thursday and Saturday evening screenings, "Climates" is, by turns, sultry, chilling and dry in depicting the breakup of a photographer, played by Ceylan, and his lover, played by Ceylan's real-life wife, Ebru.

Given the sparse action and a lead character that's wanting in sympathy, "Climates," as with "Bamako" (albeit for different reasons), shouldn't absorb our attention as completely as it does. Yet Ceylan's digital cameras make his landscapes seem so vivid that you almost feel the eponymous climates on your skin.

One also hears good things in advance of another forthcoming festival presentation, "Triad Election," Johnny To's epic about a vicious campaign to become the kingpin of Hong Kong crime. Scheduled to be screened tonight at 9, "Triad Election" apparently has sharp teeth and even sharper knives in play as both the challenger (Louis Koo) and incumbent (Simon Yam) keep raising the stakes to unsettling degrees.

As election season in the United States heads toward the home stretch, maybe we need To's movie to remind us that there are, in fact, worse things than "attack" TV ads and acrimonious public debate in the pursuit of political power.