Bamako

A court is convened in the courtyard of a house in Bamako. The plaintiff is African civil society, the defendants are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The lawyers are robed, the witnesses speak in turn, and the procedure is entirely real. Life goes on in the same courtyard: women dye cloth, a couple is separating, a child is ill and a wedding is being prepared. Nobody takes the court seriously and everybody listens. Abderrahmane Sissako writes and directs. The structure mixes the real and the invented. The lawyers are real lawyers, some of the witnesses are real people and what they say is their own testimony rather than a script; the family in the courtyard is fiction. The subject is structural adjustment. The debt conditions imposed on African countries in the eighties and nineties, the cutting of public services and the consequences of privatisation are described through testimony. The strongest passage is the witness who cannot speak. An old man asks for the floor, his turn does not come, and in the end he sings a lament in his own language in the middle of the court; nobody translates. A parody western is cut in; it is called Death in Timbuktu and Danny Glover appears in it. Glover is also one of the producers. It screened at the 2006 Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who follow African cinema and political essay films. Who it is not for: the speeches are dense, the economic terminology is heavy, and the narrative does not advance in the conventional sense.