SAMBA TRAORE

Idrissa Ouedraogo's fifth feature is a visually lush, finely honed morality tale of personal guilt and personal ties. His cinematic purity and graceful storytelling style have garnered the filmmaker acclaim as one of African cinema's greatest talents. SAMBA TRAORE opens with an urban robbery gone awry that haunts the rest of the film. Samba makes his escape to the relative obscurity of his native village with a suitcase full of money where he falls in love with, and eventually marries, Saratou. The good-natured thief becomes both benefactor and enigma to his neighbors, revitalizing the village through his impulsive generosity while undermining his self-willed paradise with incriminating outbursts of guilt and cowardice. Meanwhile the police continue thier manhunt. Ouedraogo gives the film ans intense emotional immediacy and uses the age-old cinematic narrative device of urban/rural tension not exoticism, but as the logic driving the film's momentum, causing critics to liken it to the best of the film noir styles of Hutson and Hawks. -Kit Kalfs. In Bambara with English subtitles.