Wùlu

Twenty year old Ladji works as a conductor on a passenger van in Bamako; what he earns is not enough for him or for Ami, the older sister he lives with. When the driver’s job he thinks he has earned is not given to him he quits, and asks a drug dealer he knows to open a way for him. Before long he is rising through the lines that carry cocaine across borders, the money comes, the house changes, but the structure he has entered is a network reaching from the army to the ministries, and there is no way out of it. The account is set just before the collapse Mali would go through in 2012, and a card at the end of the film states the part drug traffic played in the breaking up of the state. Daouda Coulibaly’s ninety five minute Mali France co-production is his first film; it was shot in Bambara, and its title means dog in that language. Ibrahim Koma plays Ladji and Inna Modja plays Ami; it was completed in 2016.