Global pillage
Life and debt take the stand in Bamako

Time Out New York / Issue 593:, February 12th, 2007

By Melissa Anderson

LETHAL WEAPON Glover brings justice to Bamako.

Misguided Hollywood epics like Blood Diamond may take on the barbarity of the gem trade, but Abderrahmane Sissako tackles an even bigger, intractable force: globalization. Bamako, the Mali-based director’s latest, literally puts organizations like the IMF and the World Bank on trial in a village in the capital city of the title. The plaintiff is “African society”—teachers, griots—testifying on the disastrous effects of “the vicious circle of the debt,” in the words of one witness. For Sissako, 45, the unconventional formal strategy was necessary simply to get viewers to comprehend the enormity of the situation. “For a long time, injustice has touched the African continent, so when you talk about Africa, you reduce it to wars or people starving,” the director says, speaking through a French translator, from the Rotterdam Film Festival, where he is being honored with a retrospective. “When you’re aware of that and you’re a filmmaker, you have to repair this injustice and talk. We agree that Africa is not a poor continent, but a continent made poor, so it’s important to understand the reason why it is in this situation.”

Sissako insisted that the legal representatives would have to be played by real judges and lawyers from a mix of countries: France, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali. The director discovered William Bourdon, one of the French attorneys for the plaintiffs, by reading his articles about globalization; Roland Rappaport, who defends the financial institutions, was introduced to Sissako by a French producer. Rappaport comes off looking somewhat rapacious, especially during a scene with a street vendor in which the elderly lawyer demands to know where the Gucci label is on a pair of sunglasses. But Sissako insists he wasn’t stacking the deck: “He doesn’t look so foolish. It’s real acting—you accept getting into a character that’s not you and you play the game.”


But Bamako is much more than a trial. Sissako mixes the quotidian (a marriage disintegrates, a man lies ill, women dye cloth) with the spectacular, particularly in the scenes of a nightclub performer (a strategy the director also employed in 2002’s Waiting for Happiness, which is punctuated with ecstatic singing and dancing). “These are moments of release, of resting, for the spectator,” Sissako explains. “But more importantly it’s a cinematographic principle that if you want to convey certain ideas, you also have to create the mood to help viewers so that they’re ready to receive your message.”

The movie’s most audacious rupture is the Western within the film, called Death in Timbuktu, with a silent cowboy played by Danny Glover, who also serves as one of Bamako’s executive producers. The actor, who’s been a social activist for decades—among his many commitments, he’s a major supporter of the TransAfrica Forum—met Sissako three years ago, when they were both on a jury at the Amiens Film Festival in France. “He gave me a copy of Waiting for Happiness, which I had already seen,” says Glover, speaking by cell phone from Seattle. “It’s just one of those films you think about so much afterward; you try to deconstruct this unconventional narrative. I asked him what his next project was, and he told me about Bamako. I thought it was just so powerful; Africa’s been a part of my dialogue for all of my adult life.”

Both Sissako and Glover hope that Bamako will help shift Western audiences’ attitudes about African issues. “When people get interested in certain causes and defend them, you have to grant them this legitimacy,” Sissako says. “When they’re famous, it gets more complicated because the media take the subject for themselves. So you get sad situations when people talk about the adoption of a kid by one famous person everywhere, whereas at the same time there are families with kids who are in boats, trying to get to Europe and drowning. And nobody is interested. That’s the problem of society not being interested in the right things.”

Glover, however, remains more sanguine. “Certainly Bamako would be a good film to screen for this new Congress as they define and deliberate on the issues defining U.S. foreign policy and development and aid. I believe the public could understand the structural adjustments, the structural violence within [African] communities. Those communities that are distant from us represent some of the issues we have to deal with right here. There’s wealth created in New Orleans, just as there’s wealth created in these other countries—but the wealth isn’t distributed equitably.”

Bamako opens Wed 14 at Film Forum.

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