Cannes: ‘Timbuktu’ director Abderrahmane Sissako breaks down at press conference
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://youtu.be/m7oyrWTNoJw
The director began to weep while discussing his competition film’s depiction of the brutal Islamic law that has been instituted in his home country of Mali.
It was all too much for the director of Timbuktu, a touching humanist account of the jihadist takeover of Northern Mali in 2012. Abderrahmane Sissako broke down in tears at a Cannes press conference as he described his film’s depiction of brutal Islamist law that shattered the lives of innumerable families.
“It’s difficult. … We become more and more indifferent to the horrors if we’re not careful,” said Sissako, at times clutching his head in his hands with his voice trailing off.
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But what stops this film from drowning in its own sorrows is its humor.
Jihadists battle with dodgy cell phone signals, or aggressively debate the merits of French soccer star Zinedine Zidane. Elsewhere, in another of the movie’s stand-out scenes, young boys get round Shariah restrictions on football by playing with an imaginary ball.
“In every being there is a complexity, there is the good and the bad. A jihadist is someone we can see ourselves in,” said Sissako.
The project — a labor of love — was clearly a brave film to make. The logistics of getting this film made were almost tougher than the artistic considerations.
Sissako planned to film in Mali but had to cancel this following a flare-up of violence in September 2013. The government of his home country, neighboring Mauritania, luckily stepped in and provided a secure safe haven there for the crew to film. Sissako admits that there were still big risks to filming there.
The Hollywood Reporter for more
Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu captivates Cannes: The imagination as rebellion
by KARIN BADT
It is one of the most stunning films in the Cannes Competition this year: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, about individuals in Mali trying to maintain dignity and freedom despite the oppressive rules of the Jihadists invading their country. It begins with antelope leaping in slow-motion across the sandy steppes, until they are shot to death, and continues with evocative images of the desert and the people who live there, images that are rhythmically underscored with twanging chords of music. Each image holds an alluring sense of time. A woman washes her hair, while a man stares at her, and we hear the screechy sounds of her hair going through a comb, wielded by her pretty daughter. A truck goes by on a dusty road, carrying huge bales of golden hay. A man slowly walks alone on the steppes, searching for his cow.
These gentle shots are undercut, however, by the political context: The Jihadists have prohibited all forms of individual freedom, from smoking to playing soccer to listening to music. One woman is arbitrarily told that she can no longer sell her fish at the market, unless she wears gloves.
Still, individuals persevere — and rebel.
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“For me, cinema is an invitation, a voyage, an invitation to the freedom of the spectator. It is about sharing,” Sissako explained, shedding light on his kind of cinema, based in “open” image, so different from the classic Western model, based in “closed” plot.
“The image is the essential part of the art of film-making. When I began my studies in Moscow, in the first lesson, I learned that cinema is something that first you see and only then you hear. The frame must be an invitation, an open window to something. No one says that one is obliged to use a classic model to make a film. I don’t like American films because they don’t seem to be openings; they are not invitations. I also am careful not to have too beautiful or aesthetic an image. My images are somber, so as to avoid the Kodak look. A film should appear as a doubt, not truth. We can only pretend there is a truth.”
Huffington Post for more
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