Out 3 June/Sin City

The much anticipated screen version of Frank Miller’s noir comic Sin City opens today. The credentials of the film are good. Robert Rodriguez directs and Quentin Tarantino’s guest-directs one sequence. The cast includes Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, the prosthetically-altered Mickey Rourke and even a cameo by Miller himself. So is it Pulp Fiction for the new millennium? It certainly looks good, slick and extremely violent which may put quite a few people off. But in the end, Sin City does not transcend the fact that it is just hyperstylised fantasy with no human interest in it, except to satisfy a very male desire for hard-edged masculinity. A cartoon with human actors trying not to look human. Pointlessly fun.

Out 3 June/Mooladé

Women in revolt: Mooladé

June kicks off with one of the best films you'll see this year. Mooladé, directed by Ousmane Sembene, is a masterfully composed story about a one-woman struggle in a village in Senegal against the tradition of female genital mutilation. Colle Gallo Ardo Sy (Fatoumata Coulibaly) gives protection (mooladé) to four young girls who have fled from the village to escape from excision. Colle was circumcised herself and knows the horror only too well. The girls came to her because they knew that she had not allowed her daughter to be mutilated. Her defiant gesture ignites a revolution in the village, where a struggle between tradition and freedom gains momentum and reaches a cathartic resolution.

Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema, composed in Moolaadé a moving homage to the unsung heroes of the world, whose everyday fights are the ones that really have an impact on their milieu. The film is also a sincere tribute to women and their courage to fight back against male subjugation.

Sembene was born in 1923 in Ziguinchor, sourthern Senegal and made a living as a labourer (both in Africa and Marseilles) before becoming a writer and then a film-maker. His first novel, The Black Docker, was published in 1956. He turned to cinema in 1962 when he made his first film Borom Sarret. Sembene says that the illiteracy problem in Africa was the main reason that he took to the camera, so that he could reach out for a bigger audience.

Mooladé is part of an incomplete trilogy, which started with Faat-Kine (2000) and will be completed with his next project, where he focuses on heroic deeds in daily life, the anti-thesis of the Western idea of glorified individualism that is attached to the hero myth. It's also a rarity to see a male director take such a feminist stance in the way Sembene does in Mooladé.

Mooladé is, according to Sembene, his most African film - the actors speak Senegalese dialects and the director insisted in post-producing the film in Morocco. But its resonance is universal. It's a film about the irrationality that traditions can become. Again on the subject of feminism, this is a film that the late feminist Andrea Dworkin would love to have seen, as the sex scene between Colle and her husband is literally depicted as rape (Dworkin used rape as metaphor of women’s oppression). Fatoumata Coulibaly is one of the most lingering screen presences I have seen in a long time and her charisma is the same size as her character's heart. As a film that has the potential to extrapolate the art house circuit, hopefully it will bring Sembene and other African directors to wider exposure. The West needs to see more of African cinema and the oxygen it can blow into our increasingly stuffy, joyless cinematic practice.