Timbuktu (2014)

Sissako’s moral vision of occupied Timbuktu

Country: Mali

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako

Time: 1 hour and 36 minutes

Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($2.99 to rent) and GooglePlay ($2.99 to rent)

What It Evokes: Cities under occupation, human ingenuity and creativity, melancholy

In March 2012, the Mali-based Salafist group Ansar Al-Dine (literally: “supporters of religion”) took over Timbuktu as part of a broader sweep into the country’s northeast, aligning themselves with the MNLA, a Tuareg (Berber) breakaway organization fighting against the central Malian government in Bamako.  By December 2012, the UN Security Council had passed a resolution authorizing the deployment of an African-led International Support Mission spearheaded by the African Union.  Unexpected advances made by Ansar Al-Dine led to French intervention in January 2013 and the eventual recapture of Timbuktu.  As a parting gift, the group made international headlines by burning a library filled with historical manuscripts and scrolls dating back to the thirteenth century when Timbuktu emerged a central axis in the trans-Saharan salt and gold trade and a regional center of Islamic thought and study. 

In 2013, Abderrahmane Sissako began shooting Timbuktu, a film examining the impact of the city’s occupation on both local inhabitants and a nomadic Tuareg cattle herder involved in a local dispute. Timbuktu remains a film of clashes: city and hinterland, systems of law and belief, patterns of life, the conflict between human exuberance and its negation.  In 1949, Theodor Adorno famously noted, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Yet, poetry continues. And it infuses Sissako’s film, a testament to the fortitude and difficulties of life under occupation and, perhaps even more impressively, a vision grand enough to encompass humanizing the occupiers.  Sissako’s jihadis (like the real thing) tend to be less than perfectly educated on their own belief structures. They extort, seek pleasures of the skin, and struggle with their own rules (including, in a beautiful scene, giving up smoking). They are often young and lost. Yet, they can also be merchants of meaningless, shocking, undeserved death. Thus, the film condemns without essentializing, never forgetting that complex, flawed individuals stand on either side of the gun. A favored theory of mine sees artists not merely as purveyors of ambiguity and complexity, but ambivalence.  This can make topical filmmaking difficult since ambivalence and the political tend to exist in tension. Politics (and, by extension, political films) rely upon the construction of coalitions motivated by certain aims utilizing persuasion (or violence, depending) to achieve desired outcomes. By contrast, ambivalence undermines certainty.  Yet all great film aspires to a higher truth than the enumeration of facts in service of logical argumentation. Movies rarely have a point.  To quote a very different artist, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know… So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.” This is not truth in the sense of a faithful representation of verifiable happenings. Similarly, Sissako’s veracity resists the documentary.  To take but one example, it remains doubtful that a group of children in Timbuktu organized a soccer game between two teams without a ball—sports being outlawed during the city’s occupation—and crisscrossed a dirt field imagining its existence as they play a match. Yet, there may be no truer scene in recent film.

Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:

Abderrahmane Sissako — Bamako (2006)

Abderrahmane Sissako — Waiting For Happiness (2002)