Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and Its Controversial Reception

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.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 2014). 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.²

“I worry about Mali because I am a citizen of the world,” says Sissako (Dowd 2014). “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...