In a Bambara village in Burkina Faso, Collé is a rare woman who refused to allow her daughter Amasatou having female genital circumcision, an ancient tradition in her culture, since she lost two children that way before her. Four young girls run to Colle asking for a sanctuary against the circumcision, and she invokes the ancient rule, "Moolaade", which grants protection around the compound of the village, by tying a rope at the entrance. The elders constantly scold Colle for defying the tradition, and forbide Amasatou from ever marrying the much beloved Ibrahima, a man who worked in Paris and now returned with radios, TV sets and riches for the village. On the insistence of his older brother, Colle's husband whips her publicly in front of people, trying to force her to renounce "Moolaade" for the four girls, but a local merchant, Mercenaire, intervenes and stops the cruelty. Ibrahima announces he doesn't mind that Amasatou isn't circumcised. In the end, Colle and the women rebel, collect all the knives and end the tradition of circumcision.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, Ousmane Sembene's last film, "Moolaade" is a bitter contemplation about the damage caused by people enslaved by dogmatic-archaic traditions, in this case female genital mutilation, still practiced at that time in some African Muslim villages. "Moolaade" is an honest, emotional and humanistic little film that criticizes any kind of religious fundamentalism which is harmful, and advocates for a broadening of human rights and perspectives: in that sense, the first sign of technology, a car, shows up only some 42 minutes into the film, driving the Cosmopolitan Ibrahima returning from Paris up to the village, bringing radios and TV sets which allow contact to the outside world, symbolizing the expanded wordview that slowly reaches even this isolated place, which formerly only had this one narrow way of life. The main protagonist is thankfully a woman, Colle (very good Fatoumata Coulibaly), who becomes a sort of female revolutionary who wants to reform the society and end the gential mutilation practice.
Women, as symbols of those who give birth ("Hope brings birth to courage!", says one of them), also here become symbols of a birth of a new humanistic era. But as the old saying goes: social issue movies are not very cinematic. "Moolaade" relies mostly on these (noble) messages, and less on some other stylistic components to keep also movie buffs satisfied. Sembene directs the movie in a conventional way, and with a running time of 120 minutes, at least 30 minutes could have been cut for a better pacing, yet he also shows a lot of care and delicacy towards telling the story: only one example of a genital mutilation is implied, not shown directly, depicting how a 10-year old girl is being held by her arms and is crying, begging them not to cut her, while a masked woman with a knife is seen going beneath her. As it is hinted at, as flawed and problematic as the modern world is, it is still ten times better than some of these primitive, cruel traditions from the past. The people in the village are good people, but when given the (imposed) task of upholding an ideology, they resort to fanaticism, using misleading euphemism (genital mutilation is called "purification") and attacking Colle by reframing it as if she is the crazy one. Little details give the movie spark (an old radio is placed on the ground, several cockroaches exit from it, and a chicken starts chasing them), but if there is one moment that is a small perfection, then it is the finale that ends with a match cut involving a camera pan of smoke rising to the tower of a spiked ancient building, and then transitioning to the scene of an antenna, allegorically showing how despite numerous hardline attempts at holding on to regressive conservatism in any shape or form, the society is eventually destined to progress to a modern way of thinking.
Grade:+++
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