REVIEWS“The late Idrissa Ouédraogo was one of Africa’s preeminent cinematic voices, a master chronicler of tradition and transition in his native Burkina Faso. His international breakthrough Tilaï, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is a stunning folkloric fable in which a man’s forbidden love for his stepmother sets into motion a devastating chain of events as prescribed by tribal law. Working in a seemingly effortlessly lyrical style – with elegantly minimalist compositions and music by jazz great Abdullah Ibrahim – Ouédraogo achieves ‘a flawless balance of wit and tragedy’ (New York Times).”
— BAMCinematek “Ouedraogo (who studied filmmaking in the Soviet Union and France) films the villages’ architecture and their natural settings with love and anguish. He turns low walls and open doors into virtual frames within frames, and extracts drama from the varied landscape of hills and plains, with its expanses and vistas, its Sophoclean crossroads and the mortally decisive encounters that arise there. The theatrical rhetoric that the filmmaker underplays in speech bursts into his images, which are as poised and majestic as they are starkly analytical. It’s as if his wide-ranging views of the region were virtually crisscrossed by the sharp and implacable lines of the law. He’s also as deft with intimate action as he is with long-range compositions; he films a scene of violence, at a moment of crisis, in a single shot of brisk restraint that fuses banality and grandeur, the physical and the mythic, the profane and the sacred, with a sense of awe and horror that’s the very essence of the tragic dimension.” – Richard Brody, New Yorker |
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGSTimaru
Tuesday, 01 August, 6.00pm New Plymouth Wednesday, 16 August, 6.00pm Auckland Monday, 28 August, 6.15pm Wellington Monday, 04 September, 6.15pm Hamilton Monday, 11 September, 6.30pm Palmerston North Wednesday, 20 September, 6.00pm Nelson Tuesday, 03 October, 6.00pm Dunedin Wednesday, 11 October, 7.30pm Whanganui Monday, 23 October, 7.00pm 
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