Burkina Faso / 1992 / 85mins / Drama / Mooré and French

After committing a robbery in which his partner is killed, Samba returns to his village hoping to forget his past. He meets an old flame, Saratou, and settles down with her and her son. Yet his memories threaten to destroy his new-found happiness. As in his earlier work, Ouedraogo’s storytelling has a magical quality, but here the characters and setting are thoroughly modern.

Idrissa Ouédraogo

Idrissa Ouédraogo was born in Banfora, Burkina Faso, in 1954. He trained at the African Institute of Cinematography in Ouagadougou, continued his studies in Kiev, USSR and Paris, France, and graduated from the Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1985. His work often explored the conflict between rural and city life and tradition and modernity in his native Burkina Faso and elsewhere in Africa. His first feature film, Yam Daabo, was presented at the Cannes Film Festival. This success was followed by Tilaï (1990), the winner of a special jury prize at Cannes and the Grand Prize at FESPACO in 1991. Yaaba and Samba Traoré were screened at the first New York African Film Festival in 1993. In 1997, Kini and Adams, a South African co-production, competed in Cannes. Ouédraogo also worked on a television series called Kadi Jolie and his feature The Wrath of the Gods opened the 2003 edition of FESPACO. Shortly after the end of the making of The Wrath of the Gods, Ouédraogo opted for a kind of cinema more closely adapted to the needs of Africans, to compete with the invasion of satellite images that are not representative of Africa. Ouédraogo passed away in February of 2018 at the age of 64, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Learn More