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One of the year’s stand-out world cinema releases, writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako’s live-wire polemic unfolds around a courtyard in Mali, where the African people have brought a (fictional) class action lawsuit against the World Trade Organisation. Big questions about poverty and debt cancellation are interspersed with funny, zappy vignettes illustrating day-to-day African life: a wedding procession passes through, one village elder stages a vocal protest, while some heavy-duty testimony pertaining to the International Monetary Fund is almost drowned out by a toddler’s squeaky slippers.

Any other courtroom would have these interlopers removed, but Bamako subscribes to a view of democracy where everybody gets heard. The approach risks seeming flippant – there’s a momentary cowboy spoof starring Danny Glover – but Sissako gets the prosecution’s key facts over loud and clear, and without having to rely on the increasingly popular device of having white Westerners break the bad news to us gently. Never preachy, always colourful, this beguiling, one-of-a-kind picture announces a filmmaker capable of flicking effortlessly between styles and substance, like a Godard out of Africa.

 

Mike McCahill on 13th June 2007
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