Ousmane Sembene’s last film manages to keep its focus tight on one community, to weave in warmth and humor and a real sense of pleasure in the everyday, while tackling the big issue of female genital mutilation. It doesn’t preach, doesn’t lay on the horrors with a trowel, in fact while being terribly moving it’s not really melodramatic….
By keeping such a focus and tone, the politics of the movie–and its feminist ethos–also remains local, and hopeful. The challenges to the ritual practice emerge from certain women’s resistance, and their critique ripples out through and changes the community. The men blame the outside world, only audible via the radios all the women listen to, but the women’s resistance is carefully orchestrated and illustrated as entirely organic. If any of you folks do see this, I’d love to discuss its approach to politics more, what seems like the film’s disinterest in (or refutation of) the “postcolonial” or global as the engine of change…..
But don’t see it just to talk abstractions or political theory. It’s a very strong, lovely, small-scale film, deceptively simple and naturalistic.