Sunday 31 May 2015

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Timbuktu, right at the heart of the world


Timbuktu Movie Still via The Conversation.


William Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film at University of Roehampton, shares in The Conversation his impressions of Oscar Nominated film Timbuktu, a film that even though it has a storyline, consists mainly of juxtaposed vignettes, which according to Brown give the film an abstract feel.

"A tracking shot of a gazelle running across the northern Mali desert. Shattering gunshots. A van of men is chasing the beast, concerned not to kill, but to exhaust and capture it. More gunshots: traditional wooden statues are blown to bits in the sand.
These armed marauders are jihadists arriving from Libya and other countries into Azawad, the region of Mali in which Abderrahmane Sissako’s new film Timbuktu is located. They don’t speak the local languages (particularly Tamasheq, a Tuareg dialect) and so use translators and a mixture of Arabic, Bambara, French and English in order to ensure that women wear gloves and socks, that men roll up their trouser legs, and to ban, inter alia, football, music, smoking, loitering in the streets and sitting on one’s doorstep. Woe betide anyone who breaks these arbitrarily-imposed laws; it’s lashes, stoning or a gunshot for them." Read full article in The Conversation. E.T.P. 5'

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