Day eight: Timbuktu (March, 17)

Happy St. Patrick's Day (at least it was when I began writing this post).

I must say that there is a lot of irish beer in these lines, and precisely about a movie that I'm not sure what to truely think. 

Timbuktu is a beautiful picture, nominated to the Oscar of best foreign movie in 2015. The desert, the characters, the way that we are lead to enter a comunity infiltrated by jihadist rebels thought the life of its inhabitants. 

The growing knot in the throat in front of many injustices projected on the screen is a constant feeling during the movie. The invaders have no ears to the locals, and it is more noticeable by the babel that is installed in the town: arabic, french, english, Bambara, Songhay are the languages listed on the production's page on imdb. Homicide trials are manage through a rough translations. 

But it is the big picture, and the film bring us also the smaller ones, that are part of the everyday life: a man has to take out his pants because the lenght of it - the lawfull one is in the middle of the calf (what?). His pants refuse to stay put at this lenght, so he has to take it out and walk the streets in his underwear. Bureaucratic violence in its fullness, marked beautifully in the soccer game without a ball (a scene for life).

A violence that let the inabitants lost in the desert, running through sand in toward nobody knows what. A place where the craziest person is the one with more clarity (what is not a surprise actually) 

And in front of that, I spent the movie with my hands in my face, trying to deal with such injustice. 

But my concern, listed in the beggining of this post, is this: even in my extreme foreign politic's ignorance, I cannot conceal a nagging feeling that followed me during the screening that the film can be a bit simplist in some aspects, despite its beautiful and complex portrait of some characters. A concern that must be a product of the lack of knowledge about the subject. But I thought it was important to highlight this. Hoping that someone will take debate about with me in the comments box below...

Timbuktu. Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. With: 
Ibrahim Ahmed, Toulou Kiki, Layla Walet Mohamed. 
Writers: Abderrahmane Sissako, Kessen Tall.  France/
Mauritania, 2014, 97 min. (more like the whole duration 
of the universe in its endless agony), Stereo, Color (Cinema). 

PS: Fragments: My week with Marilyn (2011); Silver Linings Playbook (2012); Jude (Christopher Eccleston in 1996!).

PPS: The (un)civilized world of movie theater's customers: