Mali / 1993 / 120mins / Comedy, Drama / Bambara

This film tells the story of a small West African village ruled by a tyrant and his son. The movie starts and ends as a folk story told by a narrator.

For Guimba, the prince of a once prosperous trading city, the key to power is spectacle: humiliating court rituals, arbitrary displays of wrath, occult powers, even the terrifying mask which always covers his face. Guimba's authority begins to crumble when he demands that a nobleman divorce his wife so that his own son, the physical and moral dwarf, Janginé, can marry her. This ludicrous demand reveals him to the townspeople as a unrestrained beast not a prince; they jeer and defy him and abandon the city to join a rebel force.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko

Cheick Oumar Sissoko was born in 1945 in San, Mali. Having graduated from Paris University in African History and Sociology, he studied film at the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumière. He then returned to Mali and worked as a filmmaker at the Centre National de Productions Cinématographiques (CNPC), for which he directed Sécheresse and Exode Rural. Along with other young Malians, he created a collective production company called Kora Films. Sissoko, along with doctor, politician and activist Oumar Mariko, founded a political party, African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence (SADI), in 1996. Sissoko is the party's president. He was nominated as the Minister of Culture in the government of Prime Minister Ahmed Mohamed Ag Hamani and remained Minister of Culture in the government of Prime Minister Issoufi Ousmane Maïga. His film Guimba was awarded the Special Jury Prize at Locarno in 1996. La Genèse (1999) won the Etalon de Yennenga at FESPACO 1999 and was selected in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes that same year. Learn More