Yeelen

This luminous and beautiful film is set, at an indeterminate period, among the Bambara peoples of Cissé's Mali homeland, in Central North-West Africa. At its core is a spiritual battle waged to the death between a father and son (Kané); the son coming to full maturity and potency, physically through his joining with one of a local chief's wives, and spiritually through his self-driven initiation into the ancient knowledge of the Bambara, encoded in the Komo. This is no ethnographic tract, despite being uniquely informed and filled with the fetishes, rituals and codes of this threatened culture. It is a film of complete integrity: the landscape stunning, the performances (non-professional) remarkable; full of light and fire, quiet passion and profundity, pure and simple.