Abderrahmane Sissako made history with the release in December 2014 of his most recent film, Timbuktu, which portrays the occupation of northern Mali by a radical Islamist group. Timbuktu became the most widely viewed African film in the history of cinema, with more than 1 million viewers in France and netting U.S.$10 million at the box office.^{Footnote 1} At the same time, the film has been the subject of critical controversy over the filmmaker’s association with the current president of Mauritania and was almost not shown at FESPACO due to security concerns. The film’s reviews, reception, and nominations for awards over the course of the last year have been marked by glorious praise and polemical attacks, which reveal significant cultural and political tensions about the depiction of Islam, freedom of expression, and the radicalization of Muslims in France, Africa, and beyond.

Sissako directed this feature film and also co-authored the screenplay with Kessen Tall. Sylvie Pialat, a French businesswoman and independent film producer, produced Timbuktu with Worso Films (and others including Arte and Dune Vision) on a relatively modest budget of €2.5 million. Sofian El Fani, who worked on Blue is the Warmest Color (winner of the Palme d’Or in 2013) did a remarkable job with the film’s cinematography. Sissako has said that Timbuktu was inspired, in part, by an incident of an unmarried couple being stoned to death in Aguelhok, near the region of Kidal in Mali, during the Islamic occupation in 2012 (see Dowd Reference Dowd2014). The filmmaker had originally intended to make a documentary and decided against the genre for fear of retribution against anyone who might speak candidly, and he ultimately dropped the idea of filming in Mali altogether (where many of his previous films are set) after a bombing outside the army barracks in Timbuktu made his crew’s security a tangible issue for him. The story is set in Timbuktu, as the title indicates, although most of the scenes were filmed in Oualata, a town in southeastern Mauritania, with only two days of filming on location in Timbuktu.

The opening sequence of the film announces hunting as a central motif. First we see Islamists in the back of a pickup truck tracking a gazelle across the desert, occasionally shooting at the graceful animal running for its life with their assault rifles. But they do not shoot to kill; they say they enjoy the sport of the chase and want to tire out the animal. Next comes a symbolic tableau about the assault on art and the decimation of culture; we are presented with a medium shot of African masks and statuettes lined up on a sandy embankment being shot at, and then the camera moves in for a close-up that lingers on what remains of the breasts on the female figures. Together these two sequences introduce the theme of voracious destruction and the perpetration of violence that will destroy everything in its path: animal life, human life, culture. Timbuktu was an ancient center of Islamic learning, culture, and trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unfortunately, the full extent to which Ansar Dine, an Islamist sect with ties to Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb that occupied northern Mali, devastated the city’s irreplaceable cultural artifacts, from mausoleums to manuscripts, is not developed in the film and thus remains only implicit, at the symbolic level.^{Footnote 2}

“I worry about Mali because I am a citizen of the world,” says Sissako (Dowd Reference Dowd2014). “The fact I grew up there is secondary. It's appalling that a group of people can turn up and transform Islamic society, which for centuries has been tolerant and kind, into something so intolerant.” Sissako’s cosmopolitan concern for the people of northern Mali fuels the narrative in Timbuktu, which is elaborated with a focus on how the Islamists behave collectively and individually. We see them leverage the humanity of a white Western hostage, tending to his medical prescriptions so that they might collect a ransom, demonstrating how they operate as a terrorist group. When they leave their base camp in the mountains to patrol the city on motorcycles, we see them fully in action: Islamist recruits announce the implementation of Sharia law using megaphones, going street by street, and speaking in local languages. Women—even fishmongers—must wear veils, socks, and gloves, while men are told to roll up their pants legs in the style of the Taliban. There shall be no smoking, no soccer, and no music. Adultery during Ramadan is proclaimed the worst sin of all. The dissemination of these new rules culminates in a masterfully ironic scene that undercuts the moral basis of their claims to be imposing a purer version of Islam, when a group of jihadi men make an unholy entrance into a mosque with their shoes on and guns slung over their shoulders. The dialogue that follows with the imam clearly establishes the contrast between the men of faith in Timbuktu, who want to pray in peace, and the foreign fighters who carry AK-47s without respect or knowledge of Islamic customs. “Have you come to do your jihad in the mosque?” asks the imam, who explains that his commitment to his own spiritual self-examination must come before imposing laws on others.

Sissako also makes deft use of irony elsewhere as he continues to reveal the hypocrisy of these men with guns. One day Abdelkrim, an Islamist who sneaks away to smoke, sets off on patrol in his truck and visits the nomadic camp outside Timbuktu where a Tuareg family lives. Abdelkrim asks his driver in Arabic to tell Satima, Kidane’s beautiful wife, that she should cover her hair. She replies in Tamashek with dry irreverence that he should not look at things he does not like to see. In this scene, the Islamist appears as a foreign bully who seeks to impose oppressive standards of female modesty even as he is flirting with a married woman who was minding her own business.^{Footnote 3} Sissako creates other moments of beautiful irony when French recruits who are avid soccer fans sit around talking about their favorite teams and players, even though the sport is explicitly outlawed—a scene that drew laughter from the audience at the Burkina Cinema in Ouagadougou (Sotinel Reference Sotinel2015). In another scene that elicited a similar response, the Islamists attempt to film a propaganda video and cannot get the former hip-hop artist to make a convincing statement. “We’re not doing, ‘Yo, man,’” says the videographer, “we’re doing religion” (see Scott Reference Scott2015). They are never able to capture even fake sympathy for the cause of radical Islam. Yet one of the most beautiful cinematographic moments in the film is a scene in which a group of boys play soccer without a ball. This small act of defiance affirms their humanity in the face of such an inhuman instrumentalization of religion.

The central conflict in the film that eventually spirals out of control involves Kidane, Satima’s husband, and a fisherman named Amadou. First Sissako establishes the beautiful simplicity of their Tuareg way of life with magical scenes in which Kidane plays his guitar and sings with his wife, and the family spends time together talking and drinking green tea in the shelter of their tent. One day Issan, a boy who tends their cattle, comes back to the house in tears and informs Kidane that Amadou killed their favorite female cow because she got tangled in his fishing net. Satima, who had previously asked her husband to allow them to leave the area to escape the encroachment of the Islamists, advises her husband to go unarmed when he confronts Adamou. When Kidane disregards his wife’s wise advice, it leads them into trouble. After he accidentally shoots and kills the fisherman, Kidane is arrested and tried by a tribunal set up to enforce Sharia law. While the loss of cattle for a modest Tuareg family is not in itself a trivial matter, in the grander scheme of things the quotidian nature of this conflict fails to capture the actual brutality of the Islamists who cut off thieves’ hands, raped innocent women, and destroyed Sufi shrines with pickaxes.

Kidane’s arrest and unexpected separation from his family are effectively interwoven with other dramatic scenes depicting the general atmosphere of terror inflicted on the local population, albeit in rather discreet terms. One evening, some young people are playing music and singing when the Islamists barge in and arrest the female singer. Fatou continues singing even as the zealous police punish her with a public whipping, another small act of defiance against their barbaric interpretation of Islam. These tensions reach their peak when a man and a woman are buried up to their necks in sand and stoned to death in the town square in punishment for adultery. The lingering close-up on their dead faces recalls the opening sequence when Sissako displayed, in similar fashion, the symbolic destruction of culture. Sissako evokes the insanity of this situation by intercutting the public stoning scene with images of an Islamist man who breaks into uncontrollable dance in the privacy of a courtyard of a crazy lady who cannot quit talking about the Haitian earthquake that destroyed so many lives. The jarring juxtaposition of a fanatic dancing and the lingering close-ups of two lovers stoned to death and left as a public spectacle conveys the human tragedy for perpetrators and victims.

The drama concludes with another senseless death. Kidane and Satima’s beautiful daughter, Toya, misses her father, whose sudden and unexplained absence from home has left her bereft. She waits in vain for his phone call. But just as Kidane is about to be shot in public, Satima arrives in town on the back of a motorcycle. As Kidane runs to greet his wife, his executioners misinterpret this as an attempt to flee and kill both the husband and wife. In the final sequence, Sissako makes poignant use of dramatic irony when we see Toya, who viewers know is now without any parental protection, running across the desert in search of her parents in the city. Sissako also deliberately employs the same kind of tracking shot used to film the graceful gazelle in the opening scene, which suggests a grim fate for this lovely twelve-year-old girl who will eventually be shot (whether by accident, in sport, or as punishment) or will have to face the new order in town as an orphan.

The strongest aspect of Sissako’s Timbuktu can be seen in the way he orchestrates the confrontation between radical Islam’s dehumanizing appropriation of religion, with its brutality and ideological rigidness, and the defiant humanity of ordinary citizens. The way he captures the simple way of life of a pastoralist family outside the city offers a lesson that unfortunately has been seen far beyond the Tuareg lands, as these scenes no doubt seem familiar and relevant to viewers in other places, from Afghanistan to northern Nigeria. The jihadists were able to take over, Sissako has said, because there was not enough social structure to keep them out. In this respect, Timbuktu follows up on the legacy of poverty and dispossession that Sissako addressed is his film Bamako (2006), which presents a critique of the devastating effects of neoliberal policies in Mali. One of his motivations for making the film was to get leaders in Mali to pay more attention to problems in this Saharan region, which has been largely left to fend for itself, with much of the population living in extreme poverty. Sissako also indicts the West and observes,

Sissako’s ability to provide both a local perspective on the specific issues ordinary people face while speaking in their native African languages and an informed critique of a dynamic that has implications worldwide—in this case, the moral hypocrisy of radical Islamic jihad—makes Timbuktu a powerful and relevant film. A. O. Scott (Reference Scott2015) observed that “with some adjustments, it could have been set in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria or Pakistan. But the glory of ‘Timbuktu’ lies in its devotion to local knowledge, in the way it allows its gaze to wander away from violence toward images of beauty and grace.”

The film’s premiere took place in Nouakchott at a film festival in September 2014 that was attended by the Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and several ministers in his government (see Al-Sheikh Mohamed Reference Al-Sheikh2014). Sissako had recently announced that he had become a cultural advisor to Abdel Aziz, a development that has attracted some vigorous criticism (and to which I shall return later). Sissako’s Timbuktu was nevertheless a stunning success in the West. In addition to the captivating cinematography and original soundtrack, the film offers a valuable African point of view on a timely conflict in much the same way Newton Aduaka did with Ezra (2007). Timbuktu was the only African film officially selected in competition for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. While Sissako’s film did not win, it was warmly received and took two minor awards, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize. Timbuktu is the first Mauritanian film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Although Timbuktu did not win the Academy Award, it got rave reviews from some of the most reputable film critics in America, from Richard Brody at The New Yorker, who called it “an extraordinary film” (see http://cohenmedia.net/films/timbuktu), to A. O. Scott (Reference Scott2015) at The New York Times, who wrote, “Not just a timely movie, a great one. . . . Timbuktu feels at once timely and permanent, immediate and essential.”^{Footnote 4}

After winning a remarkable seven Césars on February 20, 2015—including Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Director—Timbuktu played concurrently in 282 movie theaters across France and was ultimately seen by more than one million French viewers, making history as the most widely viewed African film in France (Forster Reference Forster2015a; Nouchi Reference Nouchi2015). It is undeniable that the timeliness of Sissako’s critique of radical Islam contributed to the film’s phenomenal success in France for reasons partially beyond his control, involving the national trauma of the Charlie Hebdo shooting on January 7.^{Footnote 5} Following the attack, the response across the Muslim world was particularly intense when the editors at Charlie Hebdo featured another cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed on the cover a week after the shooting. But in addition to the offensive images of the Prophet, the fact that the vandalism of dozens of mosques across France went practically unreported further inflamed anti-French sentiment in West Africa. Days of violent rioting erupted in Niger and protests, mostly peaceful, swept across West Africa.^{Footnote 6} As A. O. Scott (Reference Scott2015) has noted, Timbuktu was briefly banned in a cinema in the Parisian suburbs in the wake of violence associated with the Charlie Hebdo incidents. But these African responses to the incident would have a direct effect on Timbuktu’s screening and reception on the African continent.

When the film was shown in Burkina Faso on March 5, 2015, Siegfried Forster (Reference Forster2015a), reporting for Radio France Internationale, remarked, somewhat inaccurately, that “the most watched African film in the history of cinema finally arrived in Africa.” Although it premiered in Nouakchott, Timbuktu was screened at the Burkina Cinema in Ouagadougou as one of nineteen films in official competition for the Étalon d’Or de Yennenga at FESPACO. Thomas Sotinel (Reference Sotinel2015) reported in Le Monde that local viewers fortunate enough to see the first public screening in Africa were not overly enthusiastic about the film. Some viewers felt that Timbuktu simply did not live up to its hyped-up image in the media, while others cited serious omissions and lamented the fact that the film did not adequately capture the climate in which hands were chopped off and women raped during Ansar Dine’s occupation of northern Mali. On the other side, the Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé defended Sissako’s film and claimed that Timbuktu represents an “awakening in African cinema” (Bornet Reference Bornet2015). In the end, Hicham Ayouch won the Étalon d’Or de Yennenga for his film Fièvres and Sissako’s film was snubbed, winning only minor prizes for music and decor (see Courbet Reference Courbet2015).

One of the issues that surrounded the mixed reviews of the film in Africa relates to the filmmaker’s controversial association with the current Mauritanian president. President Abdel Aziz is a high-ranking military officer who arrived in power by a series of coups before standing in an election that he ostensibly won in 2009. However, political opposition parties in Mauritania boycotted the last presidential election in 2014, in which Abdel Aziz won another five-year term with 82 percent of the vote (BBC News 2015). The Mauritanian president is credited with having helped negotiate a ceasefire involving terrorist groups in northern Mali and has close ties with both the United States and France in their counterterrorism initiatives in the region. At the same time, he is viewed inside and outside his country as a leader who detains dissidents and does not guarantee the freedom of expression that is necessary for open debate of contentious issues such as slavery (see, e.g., Forster Reference Forster2015b). On February 20, 2015 (the same day as the French Césars and two weeks before FESPACO opened), Nicolas Beau (Reference Beau2015) posted an article on his website, Mondafrique.com, that sparked a polemic in the world of French-speaking Africanists.^{Footnote 7} He launched a scathing attack on Sissako, with very little to say about his film Timbuktu except that it is boring and irrelevant, but primarily challenging the artist’s relationship with Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. Beau made the questionable claim that Sissako somehow “agreed” to make a film about the occupation of northern Mali in order to divert attention from the more important subject matter of slavery in Mauritania and the detention of activists who oppose the practice, which is nominally illegal but remains a stubborn issue. The scandal that Beau’s article created was already in full bloom by the time the jury members in Ouagadougou deliberated and awarded their prizes. At least for some critics and viewers in Africa, it appears that one aspect of this smear campaign stuck: a common viewpoint is that Sissako may be pleasing to French viewers, but he does not have the ethical courage of a politically engaged artist at home.

Another aspect of controversy surrounding the screening of Timbuktu in Africa involved the government’s initial decision in Burkina Faso to cancel the film’s public showing. A spokesman for the government had initially made a statement saying that the film would not be shown due to “security concerns” as a result of the “current environment in West Africa” (Obenson Reference Obenson2015). This statement was soon retracted and the film screening went ahead as planned with heightened security measures, including the use of metal detectors for the first time at FESPACO. While there were no specific credible threats, it is also true that the region had been experiencing an uptick in violent popular protest that was not unrelated to the timely subject matter explored in Sissako’s film.

For example, on January 16, 2015, after Friday prayers, protests erupted in Zinder, Niger’s second largest city, with reports of demonstrators waving the Boko Haram flag for the first time on Nigerien soil. This event marked the beginning of a wave of violence across this country that shares a border with Burkina Faso (Agence-France Presse 2015; Graham-Harrison Reference Graham-Harrison2015). Peaceful protests also took place after Friday prayers in several other countries in the region including Algeria, Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania. On January 17 the violence escalated across Niger, sparking widespread riots in which forty-five churches, thirty-six street vendors, five hotels, several bars selling alcohol, a police station, the French Cultural Center in Zinder, an orphanage, and a Christian school, among other locations, were burned and vandalized (Al-Jazeera Reference Al-Jazeera2015; Massalaki Reference Massalaki2015). Protestors told reporters they were demonstrating against Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon depicting the prophet Mohamed on its cover after the shooting in Paris. Yet in addition to the sense of many Muslims that their faith was being mocked in the French press, there was also a wave of anti-Islamic violence that swept across France, including graffiti and shots fired at mosques, that went virtually unreported in contrast to the spectacular reaction to the deaths of eleven French people (Le Figaro 2015). This asymmetry added to an impression of bias and disregard for the lives and values of Muslims in France, generating a sense of social isolation in Europe and angering relatives in Africa. According to religious scholars in Niger, there is now cause for concern among moderate Muslims in the country who say that powerful imams in cities like Zinder have started to instrumentalize their faith for political reasons (Boisbouvier Reference Boisbouvier2015).^{Footnote 8} Of course, these are precisely the dynamics that set the stage for the recruitment of young men into the kind of radical Islamic groups that Sissako represents in Timbuktu.