Timbuktu

Not being a man of any religiosity at all, the effects seems to me all the more potent when a group of Jihadists arrive in this town and start to impose Sharia law. Now I don't wish to get all political here, but what we see for the next ninety minutes or so offers us some of the most appalling and disturbing scenes I've ever seen in a fact-based film. It's presented in an effective docu-drama style and follows storylines that see the townsfolk fall foul of their uninvited new regime. To add some context, one man gets 20 lashes for playing football - because it is banned. A woman receives many...

TMDb lists _Timbuktu_ as a French film — a legacy of TMDb’s rigid, funding-based categorisation system. But that’s a bureaucratic fiction. _Timbuktu_ was shot in Mauritania, directed by a Mauritanian (Abderrahmane Sissako), and submitted by Mauritania for the Oscars. To deny it as a Mauritanian film is to prioritise production money over cultural authorship — a quietly colonial impulse that continues to erase African voices from their own stories. Cinema is more than contracts and credits. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

_Timbuktu_ is a film of quiet fury, showing how a city fame...