Yeelen

So, when was the last time you saw a movie by Ousmane Sembene, the 80-year-old "father of African cinema"? Or what about anything by Djibril Diop Mambety, Cheick Oumar Sissoko or any of the many other major filmmakers currently working in Africa?

With exotic imports from Iran to Iceland finding their way onto the arthouse screens of 21st-century America, African cinema might just be the final frontier. That final frontier might be just a touch closer to melting away, however, thanks to a wonderful new series of important African films released on DVD by Kino on Video.

The best of this series, and probably the most acclaimed of all African films (it won the 1987 Jury Prize at Cannes), Malian director Souleymane Cisse's Yeelen combines magical realism and distinctly African iconology to forge a hypnotic tale of a young warrior's coming-of-age. Based on a 13th-century tribal legend, Yeelen tells the story of Niankoro (Issiaka Kane), a young Bambara warrior whose quest for spiritual enlightenment culminates in an uber-Oedipal battle to the death with his shaman father.

Long celebrated in the oral poetry of the Bambara, Yeelen is a creation myth in which spiritual struggle, death and rebirth chase each other's tails in an endless cycle of cosmic cause and effect. Similarly, Cisse's film unfolds in an unconventional, nonlinear manner, underscoring the Bambara concept of time as a circular phenomenon that repeats itself without end. The film's very title refers to the brightness in which the world is created and destroyed, again and again and again.

Yeelen is filled with ravishing imagery both mystical and elemental, some of which is grounded in specific West African lore and symbolism bound to leave at least a few western viewers scratching their heads. The essence of the story Cisse relates, however, is as accessible as it is epic, a tale of universal appetites to be happily gobbled up by any lover of world cinema. Beyond that, the film offers a visual experience of such exquisite beauty that it's easy to overlook the occasional cultural obscurity or the stray, stilted performance from one of the non-professional actors.

There are no extras on the Kino on Video DVD of Yeelen, but the subtitles are clear and well translated, and the vivid and mostly blemish-free picture does full justice to the film's crucial imagery and its palette of warm earth tones. In any event, it's simply a treat to finally be able to lay eyes on Yeelen, which, at its best, is a work of profound visionary power, the likes of which most of us have never seen.

This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2004.