"Set mainly in rural Burkina Faso, the director's homeland, the movie was made in the amateur format of 16-mm film, with a low budget, a small crew, and a largely nonprofessional cast, including several of the filmmaker's family members, as befits its family-centered drama: a young woman named Bintou and a young man named Issa want to marry, but another man, Tiga, aggressively pursues Bintou and threatens Issa's life."
"Although the central story is intimate in scale, the film's scope is large and its social purview deep, and this vast amplitude is a function of Ouédraogo's way of staging action, or, rather, of envisioning it. Using modest means and methods, 'Yam Daabo' proves to be more than just engaging-it's exemplary."
"The romantic tale, of one kind of choice, is nested in a dramatic frame, of another choice, that's at once local and international. The movie opens with labor in a drought-stricken village: men feed a flame with bellows, hammering metal into a blade, while other residents wait nearby, baskets in hand."
Idrissa Ouédraogo's 1987 debut feature 'Yam Daabo' (meaning 'The Choice') is a rural Burkina Faso drama made on 16-mm film with a low budget and largely nonprofessional cast. The film centers on young lovers Bintou and Issa whose relationship is threatened by an aggressive rival named Tiga. Beyond this intimate romantic conflict, the narrative encompasses larger social and political dimensions, opening with scenes of drought-stricken villagers receiving grain aid from the United States. Ouédraogo's distinctive approach to staging and envisioning action creates substantial thematic depth despite modest production means, establishing the film as both engaging and exemplary of original realist cinema.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]