Mundane militants

News articles have chronicled the horrors of Islamist rule in detail, so the extremes will be familiar in the film Timbuktu: stonings, forced marriages, laws forbidding music and requiring women to cover themselves head to toe. Timbuktu, in limited release Jan. 28, is not a documentary but retells the 2012 Islamic militant takeover of the fabled city in Mali. Neighboring Mauritania chose this film as its submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the first time it has made an Academy Awards submission. The film, which is not rated, deserves at least a nomination.

The story is very near for director Abderrahmane Sissako, who was born in Mauritania but grew up in Mali. Sissako is recounting the rule of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in his home country, but he doesn’t shy from the comparisons to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “I wanted to warn people,” Sissako said in New York after his film’s premiere, speaking in French through a translator. “If Nazism triumphed for a time, it’s because people didn’t want to see it. Consciously or unconsciously people let it grow.”

For such a heavy subject the film has comedic moments and is full of painterly beauty. It doesn’t shock and awe its audience with horrors. That, after all, is what the Islamic State has been doing with its beheading videos. Sissako shows a stoning for a split second, and the camera quickly turns to a new scene. A young girl is forced into marriage with a jihadist; all we see is a few seconds of her crying on a bed.

What makes Sissako’s film so devastating is that he doesn’t dwell in the extremes and he doesn’t caricature. We see the mundane life of militants, militants who argue about whether Lionel Messi or Zinedine Zidane is a better soccer player. Later those same militants haul a soccer-playing man before a Sharia court. In another scene an older jihadist tries to counsel a young jihadist, a former rapper in France, on how to make a jihad video. “There’s no, ‘Yo man,’” the older commander tells him. “We’re into religion now.” The jihadists ignore the more peaceable local imams and oppress even devout Muslims.

But the real story is about the locals who must stay and live under Islamist rule, a story often missing in news coverage. As the film opens, we see a short scene of a Western hostage, who despite his predicament is well taken care of. The jihadists have all of his medications in a plastic bag. Conditions are worse for the locals in and around Timbuktu.

Underneath the film is the idea of a Muslim resistance, almost as a hope more than perhaps reality. French troops eventually intervened in Mali and ousted al-Qaeda from power in 2013. In his comments in New York, Sissako said he believes women under Islamist rule are the ones who will rise up because they have more of a capacity for resistance. Under Islamist rule, women also have more to lose.

Sissako illustrates this in the film: In one scene, the jihadists tell a man to roll up his pants because they are too long. The man ends up taking his pants off entirely, and walking away in his shorts. Meanwhile a woman selling fish in the marketplace refuses to wear the required gloves and yells at a jihadist to go ahead and cut her hands off.

“The Western press speaks a lot about the hostages that have been taken because the hostages are Western themselves,” said Sissako. “They don’t talk about the woman in the marketplace who is forced to wear the gloves but resists. They don’t talk about the boys playing soccer. We speak more about armies and drones, but people who struggle and battle it on a daily basis aren’t talked about.”

Editor's note: On Jan. 15, Timbuktu was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category.