Layla M

LAYLA M                  B            
Netherlands  Belgium  (110 mi)  2016  d:  Mijke de Jong           Topkapi Films [Netherlands]

It’s hard to make topical films, especially when the screen reality doesn’t match the authenticity of on-the-ground news reports of terrorist attacks, police crackdowns, angry demonstrations, or following the hordes of refugees swarming into Europe, not to mention those citizens left behind in the war zones and refugee camps.  It’s a searing reality that is difficult to digest, no matter how meticulously accurate the newscasts may be.  But as links to terror organizations have been discovered within major European cities, it has led to an accompanying rise of Islamophobia, including burkini bans on French and Corsican beaches, leaving people wondering how local citizens are being recruited into jihadist organizations, where this film attempts to answer some of those questions.  Dutch director Mijke de Jong, with a script written by her husband Jan Eilander, combine their efforts in a story studying the roots of the problem.  Set in Amsterdam, Layla (Nora El Houssour) is an 18-year old student studying to become a doctor who is a Dutch citizen with a Moroccan background, living at home with her middle class Muslim family.  While her parents, including her father (Mohammed Azzay) and mother (Esma Abouzahra), encourage her to follow a promising educational path that will lead to a better life, she gets more distracted by the way Muslims are treated differently than ordinary Dutch citizens, as they are profiled simply by their appearance, labelled agitators by referees in local soccer matches, and routinely singled out and arrested by police for practicing free speech, even getting into a heated discussion with a fellow student when asked not to pray, to the point where she feels ostracized by society.  As she explores her Muslim background, she devotes more of her time studying the Quran, where she learns to identify radical phrases, scours the Internet for YouTube coverage of attacks on Muslims throughout the country and atrocities to Muslims around the globe, which she immediately shares with her friends and family, and is disappointed by the timid reaction by her parents, who lead a comfortable life and don’t make waves. 

What’s clear, at least in this film, is that she comes from a loving family, where she’s had plenty of opportunities to succeed, something her parents don’t want her to jeopardize.  She’s a bit of a tomboy, as she loves to play soccer and mix it up with the boys, and can more than hold her own when it comes to a fiery attitude, including plenty of trash talking.  But in accordance with custom, she wears a headscarf and dresses modestly, but she’s a modern woman that believes women can stand up for themselves, joining a radical group of women called the Sisters who discuss ways they can help fight repression, passing out flyers, posting YouTube videos depicting the horrors in Syria and Gaza, while also meeting a male radicalized friend that she likes named Abdel (Ilias Addab) in clandestine Skype sessions.  Developing a growing indifference towards her studies, she makes a bold move to drop out of school, secretly marry Abdel, and run away to Belgium to join a jihadist training camp, where the intimacy expressed while traveling together are among the best scenes in the film, showing a joyful and loving relationship.  But they barely avoid arrest when they leave, heading for Amman, Jordan, where they plan a life of religious activism.  While she is embraced by the women, where one takes her out to the refugee camps, where the children are starved for affection and anyone willing to spend time with them, she is totally ignored by the men, including her husband, spending long hours alone with absolutely nothing to do, where as an Islamic wife she is expected to clean the house and serve food, and do little else, as they have no use for a woman’s ideas.  The extent of the patriarchal society is not only demeaning, but cruel, as they demand total subservience, something that’s simply not in her DNA.  While she loves her husband, he positively stifles her spirit, where she’s not allowed to do anything without the husband’s permission, as the man makes all the decisions, while the subject of men’s discussions is off-limits to women.

What the film does is humanize the character of Layla, as she is searching within herself and in a surrounding society for a world without insults and recriminations, where people can lead their lives in peace without continual disruptions by police and angry citizens.  For most college-age kids, this is a fairly common dream, a belief in social justice, a hope that everyone can be treated fairly.  Instead what they discover is a daily reality of discrimination and profiling, which exists as much in black communities in America as Islamic neighborhoods in Europe.  The heavy-handed treatment, the overreactions by police that result in the shooting deaths of innocent young black men, or the continued harassment of Muslim men with beards, only leads to a seething discontent, a breeding ground for anger and radicalization, where the result is a lack of trust with existing authorities, which can lead to the extremist radicalization the film examines.  While this film asks as many questions as it answers, it attempts to fill the holes in a better understanding of what people are up against, where there are no easy decisions when facing the cruel realities of life.  One is reminded of Merzak Allouache’s Algerian film The Repentant (El Taaib) (2012) which is largely seen through a jihadist’s eyes, where despite honest efforts, they may never fully integrate back into society, as they’ve crossed too many lines.  While this is a well-meaning film, it only addresses the initial phase of radicalization, where she’s too intelligent and there are too many obstacles placed in this one woman’s path for her to become a true believer, becoming a public service corrective for someone who has swayed from the path of the civilized and was tempted by the jihadists, but ends up discovering their own extremism is too harsh.  That’s not the case with everyone, especially those coming from impoverished communities decimated by war, where there’s no hope anywhere to be found.  This is fertile territory for extremist recruits, as they have no other options.  So this is a somewhat watered down picture, but it’s helpful nonetheless, revealing how mistreatment builds discontent, that better police procedures that recognize the rights of minorities would be in society’s larger interests, as discriminatory behavior will come back to bite you.  That’s something both Europe and the United States seem to be ignoring, instead plunging ahead with more sophisticated use of surveillance and profiling techniques, where targeting racial groups will only lead to more ruthless police confrontations and create even more animosity. 

Timbuktu

Director Abderrahmane Sissako

TIMBUKTU        B+                                      

Mauritania  France  (97 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Abderrahmane Sissako

They’re singing praise to the Lord and his prophet; should I arrest them?

—young soldier radioing his superior

This film couldn’t be more timely, as it’s perhaps the only film that predicts the presence of a murderous rogue Islamic militant group like ISIL currently grabbing the headlines with beheadings and unparalleled violence, as it’s based upon real incidents that took place in Northern Mali in 2012 when Ansar Dine Islamic militants occupied Timbuktu, once the center of scholarly Islamic learning in Africa, burning down the only public library, the Ahmed Baba Institute, including 18,000 historical manuscripts in the process.  But in particular what captured the director’s attention was an event depicted in the film, the public stoning of a young unmarried couple in the northern town of Aguelhok, both buried up to their necks and stoned to death in front of hundreds of watchers, a horribly tragic incident precipitated by their view that the couple was committing a crime against divine law.  According to Sissako, “Aguelhok is neither Damascus nor Teheran, and in no way am I looking to over-emotionalize these events for the purposes of a moving film.  What I do want to do is bear witness as a filmmaker.  Because I will never be able to say I didn’t know.  And because of what I know now, I must tell this story — in the hope that no child may ever have to learn this same lesson in the future.  That their parents could die, simply because they love each other.”  Historically, different tribes controlled Timbuktu until the French colonized Mali in 1893, granting their independence in 1960, where it remains one of the poorest regions in the world.  At the request of the government, the French military was eventually called in to run the Tuareg rebels out of the region and re-establish order, where the country recently conducted democratic elections.  While the filmmaker was born in nearby Mauritania, where he was forced to shoot the film due to the actual turmoil taking place in Timbuktu, he completed his early childhood education in Mali before returning home.  He studied cinema in Moscow at the prestigious VGIK (Federal State Film Institute) and now lives in Paris, where he discovered most of the non-professional cast he used, as well as the cinematographer Sofian El Fani, who shot Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013).  Many of the lead roles are played by professional singers, the most prominent being Malian musician Fatoumata Diawara, seen here Fatoumata Diawara - Bissa (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - YouTube (3:24). 

Initially screened in competition at Cannes, the film reportedly received a 10-minute standing ovation afterwards and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury honoring works inspired by “the spiritual dimension of our existence,” and also the François Chalais Prize recognizing “the values of journalism.”  What Sissako brings to the subject is pure cinematic poetry, a common thread throughout his films, including WAITING FOR HAPPINESS (2002), winner of the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes, while also awarded the French Culture Award as the Best Foreign Cineaste of the Year, and BAMAKO (2006), a thought provoking film that examines the effects of globalization in Africa, specifically Mali, where the first world G8 nations historically stole what they could from African nations through colonialist exploitation, only to be replaced today by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund financial systems that remain even more deeply entrenched through the huge debts these impoverished nations supposedly owe to these international institutions, ranging from 40 to 60% of the nation’s total income.  Perhaps even more prescient was the director’s humorous insertion of a film within a film, a fictitious, rather cartoonish American film playing in the region called DEATH IN TIMBUKTU starring Danny Glover in a Sergio Leone style Hollywood western depicting a small African village falling under a torrent of bullets to rebel outsiders, watched in a feverish trance by children, a rather unfathomable intersection of fiction and reality.  While most of the news reports focus upon the wanton jihadist destruction of Timbuktu’s cultural heritage sites, outrageous acts that are themselves unconscionable, Sissako instead focuses upon the day to day effects it has on the local population, a tribal culture that has survived centuries in a brutally harsh sub-Sahara desert climate.  Opening in a stunning moment of lyrical beauty juxtaposed against the madness of ongoing violence, we see a truck of jihadists inexplicably firing machine guns at a deer/gazelle streaking through the desert, where the movement is captured as poetry in motion.  In the next shot, tribal carvings are destroyed by machine gun fire, where the centuries-old traditions of the past are wiped away in seconds.  The incomprehensible aspect is our entryway into understanding the presence of this occupied force, which goes against the laws of nature.  When they enter the mosque with their weapons, explaining they are practicing jihad, the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif) tells them he is practicing jihad as well, but in Timbuktu they use the mind instead of weapons, where bringing guns into the mosque is a disgrace to the piety of God.    

The film recalls the insidious terror expressed in Raoul Peck’s Haitian film The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), shot during the reign of the Duvalier dictatorship and his armed militia, the Tontons Macoute, who similarly terrorized the population.  The villagers in Timbuktu are comprised of various ethnic groups speaking French, Bambara, Songhay, and Tamasheq living in harmony with the nomadic Tuareg people, while these militants bring with them Arabic and even English speaking jihadists from around the globe, where the irony is they have soldiers drive around the city in trucks with loud speakers warning residents of the new laws, where they are not allowed to sing, play music, or dance, while covered women must wear socks at all times and gloves on their hands, but they require multi-lingual interpreters to get their ultra orthodox message of forbidden activities across.  Easily the most absurd example is banning the game of soccer, with armed men with machine guns taking the ball away, leaving the fully dressed players in uniform to continue playing without the ball in a choreographed, ballet-like pantomime that expresses the joy and beauty of movement, where these guys revere the skill level of Lionel Messi and imitate his post goal scoring celebratory moves on the field.  Mali is also known around the world for their intricate music, where the names of Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangaré spring to mind, where the idea of soldiers silencing these voices is catastrophic, but real, as they go house to house hunting down the origins of musical sounds, arresting those responsible, including Fatoumata Diawara and others who are then given 40 lashes in public, where she breaks out in song midway through her punishment.  Anyone who has seen Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) will appreciate the profound difference in how this is visually expressed, losing the grotesque aspect of mutilated flesh, where the focus is on pain, and instead adds a poetic lyricism that highlights the injustice.  Inflicting punishment, like the public stoning, appears to be the goal of Ansar Dine rebels, where they round up villagers and subject them to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic sharia law, bringing the imam out of the temple to question where does God enter into these ungodly actions?  When a young girl is hauled out of her home and forced into marriage to one of the armed rebels against the protests of her family, the ruling court claims this is perfectly legal, as “We are the guardians of all deeds.”  Against this backdrop, another local family is destroyed, where Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed, aka Pino) is a goat and cattle herder living in the freedom of a tent out in the desert with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), young daughter Toya, while also raising a young orphan Issan, who tends to the cattle every day.  When a local dispute over a dead cow results in an accidental death, Kidane is arrested and immediately sentenced to death, where the harsh and excessive punishment contrasts against the sight of rebels routinely violating their own rules, including one that lusts after Kidane’s wife, where the lingering question raised at the end is who will they be coming after next, as instead of a deer they are chasing down humans.