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.    

Big Men

Nigerian photos by Akintunde Akinleye from The Atlantic, January 15, 2013, Nigeria's Illegal Oil Refineries - In Focus - The Atlantic

BIG MEN            B-           

USA  Great Britain  Denmark  (99 mi)  2013  d:  Rachel Boynton         Official site

While Joel Berlinger’s Crude (2009) documents the way multi-national corporations like Texaco and Chevron do business with South American nations while in pursuit of oil profits, often taking the money and resources while getting out quick, leaving the land ravaged afterwards with toxic spillage left behind in the rainforests, endangering the lives of the indigenous population living there, Rachel Boynton takes a look at the business dealings on the other side of the globe, where in 2007, Ghana, with the aid of the Dallas-based Kosmos Energy Corporation, discovered new oil reserves in the Atlantic Ocean just 35 miles off their coast.  Oil had never been discovered in Ghana before, so the impact was enormous.  Seven years in the making, Boynton got into the story early on near the point of discovery, when Wall Street investment firms were projecting profits in the neighborhood of $22 billion dollars.  Hard as it is for the public to believe, new oil reservoirs are not something discovered every day, in fact it’s an extremely difficult process to locate new sources of oil, one of the specialties of Kosmos, as for the past 100 years these competing oil companies have spent a good portion of their technology and expertise scouring the earth in search of more oil, so by now there are few surprises left that haven’t already been explored.  Boynton is given rare inside access to Kosmos, developing the trust of CEO Jim Musselman, whose company is bankrolled by the investments firms of Warburg Pincus and the Blackstone Group, firms that are only interested in a hefty return for their investment, where in their eyes, the higher the risk, the greater the reward.  The combined initial investment is somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred million dollars, climbing to a billion before a single barrel of oil has been pulled out of the ocean.  Boynton’s cameras follow Musselman as he is introduced to a Ghanian tribal chief bearing bottles of Scotch and Hennessey along with a $10,000 donation to an educational charity.  The introduction is managed by a local businessman, George Owusu and his EO Group, the Ghanian oil company that brought the outside interests of Kosmos into the deal.  Despite the pleasant, easy-going nature of Musselman, raised on a family farm in Texas, there is something altogether off-putting about the experience, as it recalls notions of colonialist exploitation. 

Boynton opens the film with quotations on the subject of greed from Milton Friedman and John Huston’s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRE MADRE (1948), suggesting there is an ugly side of capitalism, which only grows more pronounced with the intersection of First World and Third World economies, where the drive for profit quickly outdistances itself from any system of laws in place, where the film is a case study on the behavior of financial sharks in the water, as the Jubilee Oil Field is a reservoir of great untapped wealth, drawing out the ruthless self-interests of all competing parties as they position themselves to determine who will reap the rewards.  Musselman is part of a business network of complex relationships, with Kosmos executives, financiers, consortium partners, and the government of Ghana which ultimately has the last word on any business dealings within its borders.  Musselman is on good terms with Ghanian President John Kufour, securing favorable terms in the initial contracts drawn, hoping to sign a Plan of Development to produce the oil.  Initially all signs are optimistic as the price of oil is skyrocketing, but this is followed both by the 2008 financial crisis depressing the price of oil and an opposition party candidate, John Atta Mills, winning the Ghana Presidential election, which puts all the political goodwill and hopes of favorable concessions in jeopardy.  Making matters worse, George Owusu also falls out of favor when he’s investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for alleged bribery and corrupt business practices, charges he vehemently denies.  Left out of the story are unmentioned partners of Kosmos, other oil companies that actually own a combined 61% stake of the Jubilee Project, including Anadarko Petroleum, a rival Texas oil firm that actually prompted the inquiry.  Nonetheless, Kosmos cuts tires with Owusu, as they want no perception of impropriety as they embark upon negotiations with the new Ghanian President, but the Kosmos Board of Directors also lose faith in Musselman and have him replaced.  This turn of events is surprising, since the arc of the story was being told through Musselman, as in the process Boynton loses internal access as well, leaving the viewer a bit in the dark.  Musselman, who remains a top executive, indignantly rationalizes how he fell out of favor, but it’s hard not to think how he did the same thing to George Owusu, who was later exonerated of all charges.   

As a counterpoint to the story of Kosmos in Ghana, Boynton intercuts scenes from neighboring Nigeria, the tenth most petroleum-rich nation in the world, and by far the most affluent in Africa, yet a combination of corporate exploitation and government corruption has turned the Niger Delta region into a nightmare of oil spills, environmental destruction and lawlessness, where armed militia groups like the Deadly Underdog militants control access to the pipelines in their territory.  As much as 75% of the profits are siphoned off into the hands of various interests, where ten years ago it was considered the second-most corrupt country on earth (after Kenya), NIGERIA: Nigeria angry at being rated second most corrupt, more recently replaced by Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan (Read more at Transparency International).  These Nigerian militants claim none of Nigeria’s oil wealth makes it back into their impoverished communities, that it instead finds its way into the hands of the “big men,” who are governmental officials and well-connected businessmen.  These images are by far the most harrowing, where holes cut into the pipelines create pools of spewing oil that are set on fire, with the local population stealing and reselling black market oil in areas perpetually surrounded by flames, as billows of black smoke surround the region, controlled by young kids wearing ski masks and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles.  While Boynton’s ability to gain access to both Jim Musselman and the Deadly Underdogs is impressive, she never makes any connection between the two, where the colonialist history of exploitation is never mentioned.  Ghana and Nigeria have differing histories, yet this is not explored, even as the director contrasts and compares the two nations.  Like her earlier film, OUR BRAND IS CRISIS (2005), Boynton chooses not to use a narrator, but instead advances the narrative by filling the screen with an excessive amount of written material, which, when added to a procession of talking heads, is a bit of information overload.  Adding the Nigerian picture is fascinating, but diverts the interest and may actually belong in another film, as this film is more a profile of the inner workings of Kosmos Energy, shedding light onto the difficulties foreign enterprise runs into when dealing with governmental instability and changing regimes.  As a portrait of an American company in search of wealth, it can at times be fascinating, especially the candid views of capitalism in progress from Musselman once he’s been ousted from power, but as a portrait of Africa, it never connects the dots, where the impact of colonialism affects every African atrocity, especially in Nigeria, where past historical transgressions impact upon the present, but this was never addressed, leaving the overall journalistic picture incomplete.