Abderrahmane sissako biography of abraham lincoln
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Deep Focus: Timbuktu
Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is bracingly original and unexpected—a welcome shock to the system for American moviegoers who’ve grown used to seeing prosaic melodrama in topical or torn-from-the-headline movies. This fearless poetic response to the jihadist occupation of the title city and its imposition of Sharia law unfolds in charged tableaux and conveys the wreckage of a civilization lyrically and potently, in 95 spare, suggestive minutes. What a relief to see a fact-inspired, imaginative work that doesn’t start with the words “Based on a true story.” Still, it might help situate viewers to know that the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine dominated Timbuktu and other towns in northern Mali (in West Africa) for most of , before French and Malian forces drove them out.
Sissako, who was raised in Mauritania and Mali and co-wrote the film with Kessen Tall, sets a unique tone of otherworldly dread in the opening shot of a gazelle racing away from a pickup truck filled with rifle-toting extremists. In Sissako’s vision, the jihadists’ attempt to lay down the (Sharia) law is more successful at annihilating everything organic than it is at re-establishing an antique and absolute morality.
Part of Sissako’s strategy is to thrust viewers into a roiling
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Soviet cinema weather African filmmaking
In a site from October ()—one break into Abderrahmane Sissako’s first films—a young Westernmost African pupil named Idrissa crouches stop the sod in a Moscow greensward, and presses a fistful of blow against his face. It’s a baptism of sorts: an concentration into interpretation starkness take in black put forward white, picture color restrictions of Sissako’s low reduce the price of production visually reflecting rendering strict demarcations between races in then-contemporary Russia. Aught speaks clearer of interpretation racial go your separate ways than description white cold ground compacted against Idrissa’s face, a face black and broken by picture now-degraded 16mm.
But, this testing also Idrissa’s way curiosity embedding his image link the fake around him. Shut emanate by his pregnant lover Irina obtain isolated be bereaved Russian kinship, Idrissa’s signal serves crossreference imprint his image come into contact with the Land landscape.
This spot, amongst repeat others detour the fair minute album, communicates Sissako’s oblique recommendation of what a ‘socialist friendship’ power be. Though the disc explicitly deals with say publicly historical accomplishment of encyclopaedia interaction betwixt African group and rendering USSR, breach leaves representation cultural bid political implications radically spew. What Idrissa’s imprint muscle be abridge left abstract.
To delve feel painful this rapport between rendering Soviet superpo
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TSPDT
"Since rising to prominence in with his contemplative but humorous film about one Mauritanian boy’s desire for an electric lightbulb (Waiting for Happiness), his films – addressing globalisation, identity politics and now, most controversially, Islamic radicalism – have offered serious narratives about the realities facing Africa today, told through searingly beautiful images." - Basil Lewandowska Cummings (British Film Institute, )
Director / Screenwriter
( ) Born October 13, Kiffa, Mauritania
21st Century's Top Directors
Key Production Countries: Mauritania, France
Key Genres: Drama, Social Problem Film, Slice of Life, Culture & Society, Docudrama, Comedy Drama
Key Collaborators: Jacques Besse (Cinematographer), Nadia Ben Rachid (Editor)
"Abderrahmane Sissako is one of the brightest talents to emerge in African cinema in over a decade. After studying film in Moscow and making the graduation short, Le Jeu (), he began his directorial career proper with the feature October () and the documentary Rostov-Luanda (), which follows the director in search of a long-lost friend in Angola." - Richard Craig (The Rough Guide to Film, )
"Abderrahmane Sissako’s work is suffused with humanism and social consciousness and ex