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Europe’s Art War Escalates to Film by Doniphan Blair
At home with the Tuareg musician whose story forms the centerpiece of the film 'Timbuktu'—dubiously distinguished by being both nominated for an Oscar and the target of jihadi threats. photo: courtesy Abderrahmane Sissako
EUROPE'S ART WAR WITH RADICAL
Islam just escalated with jihadis threatening a young film festival in Tournai, Belgium. The offense this time: "Timbuktu", Mauritania's entry to the Oscars, a moving but balanced view of al-Qaeda's takeover of that storied town in 2012.
The film festival is called RamDam, which means "inconvenient, raising questions, challenging debate, transgressive" according to its organizers. Scheduled to run from Jan 20th to the 27th, the police cleared the festival's main theater on the 22nd, after which the entire program was cancelled.
Authorities estimate 350-450 citizens of Belgium have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq with ISIL, the more-radical-than-al-Qaeda group, and that about 10-20% percent have returned.
Started in 2010 by the theater chain Imagix, the local television station and the city of Tournai, RamDam also enjoyed strong support from the great Moroccan-Belgian actress, Lubna Azabal, who starred in the hit Israeli film "Paradise Now" (2005).
Belgium sometimes plays wild West or gangster Noir to its more staid neighbors, Holland, France and Germany, but the festival directors have less of a death wish than French cartoonists. Film festivals require allowing egress to hundreds of people and are algebraically more difficult to guard than a second floor office, as with the French humor magazine, Charlie Hebdo, where seven cartoonists were killed on Jan 7th.
The threats were “repeated and substantial...at a very high level,” RamDam reps told the media, and a criminal investigation is underway.
Along with "Timbuktu", see trailer, by Abderrahmane Sissako, they were showing the provocative doc "The Essence Of Terror" and the new film from the acclaimed Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, "Two Days One Night" see trailer.
The Tinariwen, the traditional closer of Timbuktu's annual Festival in the Desert, are essentially Mali's Grateful Dead. photo: courtesy M. Ansar
“We are very sad that this cultural event has been cancelled," the Dardennes said in their statement, "(t)he obscurantism has already done a lot of damage and keeps on that way."
"But we are optimists" they continued. "Don’t forget that obscurantism has always lost the battle against our desires for freedom, sharing and discussion."
Ironically, "Timbuktu" is the perfect film to encourage fair-minded debate. Visually poetic as well as emotionally dramatic, it hardly blasphemes the al-Qaeda invaders, let alone Muhammad, leaving one wondering whether jihadi aesthetics are rising or they've gone completely "kill-art" crazy.
Director Abderrahmane Sissakoit was born in Mauritania in 1961 (his mother is Mauritanian) but grew up in Mali. After attending film school in Moscow, he settled in France in the 1990s. "Waiting for Happiness", his first film, showed in Cannes, 2002, where it took the coveted FIPRESCI Prize.
"Timbuktu" continues his style of highly localizing city-name titles which he started with the well-received "Bamako" (2010) about infidelity and punishing foreign debt in Mali's capital.
“Timbuktu” confirms [Sissako's] status as one of the true humanists of recent cinema," wrote Variety Magazine, after the film's release last year (5/24/2014).
"Set in the early days of the jihadist takeover of northern Mali in 2012, the film is a stunningly shot condemnation of intolerance and its annihilation of diversity, told in a way that clearly denounces without resorting to cardboard perpetrators."
At CineSource, we loved the film and only neglected to review it due to severe budget cuts. (I have been researching and interviewing Malians for a long piece about its culture and the 2012 transition from Tuareg tribal rebellion to al-Qaeda take-over, military coup and French invasion.)
"Timbuktu"'s surrealistic scenes—of people playing soccer without balls, of a Tuareg musician and his wife and daughter living peacefully in a tent (until he gets embroiled in a dispute with his herder neighbor), of an al-Qaeda leader learning to drive a stick shift and desperately needing a forbidden cigaret—build beautifully into coherent dramaturge.
But it pales in comparison to the Art War that actually transpired, as I learned when I spoke to Manny Ansar, Northern Mali's premier music impresario, by phone from Bamako in 2013.
One of Timbuktu's majestic mud palaces. photo: courtesy of Mali Tourism Board
In case you haven't heard:
A) Mali is the world's biggest music producing community (per capita) outside of LA, nabbing five Grammies (World Music division) in the last 25 years
B) Along with Bamako, Timbuktu is a center of that scene
C) Since 2003, they have hosted the spectacular Festival Au Desert (Festival in the Desert)
D) When al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) took Timbuktu, in the summer of 2012, they outlawed ALL music and threatened to cut out/off the tongues and hands of musicians
E) There were no protests or even many benefit concerts (no major ones) in defense of Malians, Malian art or art in general
F) Along with the cancellation of the Festival and destruction of a third of Timbuktu's Sufi shrines, this signaled that art is not that important.
As it happens, not only is Manny Ansar a close friend of the Tinariwen—Mali's biggest Sahara Blues band and the Festival's go-to show closer (they started the Festival together), he grew up with some al-Qaeda leaders.
"There were two faces of al-Qaeda," Ansar explained, about their emergence in Mali around 2008.
"At the beginning, they were very nice, always speaking slowly to convince the people—giving a lot of gifts," which included food, money and medical services. They also bribed impoverished Malian officials and paid families up to $600 to deliver sons for jihad indoctrination and training.
"But, when they started to occupy [after their conquest in 2012], they became very harsh, beating and killing people," Ansar said.
One of his friends, Iyad Ag Ghaly, from a clan of cattle herders, led Malian rebel groups since 1988 but also served as a liaison to the government, eventually joining Mali's diplomatic corps for three years as an attaché at the embassy in Saudi Arabia.
How the Timbuktu band, the Tinariwen, get to some gigs. photo: courtesy M. Ansar
"He used to be my friend for 20 years before he became an extremist," Ansar said. "He liked to dance and smoke and everything. But then he started to follow an imam from Pakistan and they converted him to this extremist way."
"After 2003, he became hardened. At the Festival, he wanted it to be only conversion time. I told him, 'This is not my way,' so our two ways separated. He was a very nice guy, very intelligent, very courageous—good character also, an honest person. But he became extremist."
In fact, Ansar's life story, from growing up in a tent outside Timbuktu to graduating from the University of International Law in Bamako and starting the Festival in the Desert threads together a series of dramatic events very suitable for cinema.
After the Timbuktu peace negotiations of 1995, which Ansar helped facilitate and which ended that Tuareg rebellion (there have been many), the rebels "traded their guns for guitars" in what became a rock-and-roll moment of massive proportions.
In 1992, Ry Cooder, the American guitarist, had already joined with Ali Farka Touré, from Niafunké (the appropriately named town south of Timbuktu) to make the hit album "Talking Timbuktu". By the time of the peace accords, Touré's sound—sometimes called Sahara Blues—was breaking across the global noosphere, much like reggae did in the 1970s, this time made by Muslims.
Inspired, the Tuareg rebels smashed or burned their weapons, or cemented them into the Flame de Paix ("Flame of Peace"), a monument constructed for the occasion in Timbuktu. Then they jumped in their trucks and raced across 300 miles of desert to Kidal for a weeks-long celebration and jam session.
Although it started much like any other tribal gathering, it captured the tenor of the times and kept expanding. A few years later, "we invited our Western friends and moved it to Timbuktu," Ansar told me.
The roofs of Timbuktu come alive after the sun sets. photo: courtesy of Mali Tourism Board
So was born the Festival in the Desert, the Sahara's celebration of peace, love and music, a mini-Woodstock in the middle of the desert, with an annual attendance of between 2000 and 3000, ranging from helicopter hippies to seasoned world travelers and many locals.
Cancelled in 2013, due to the al-Qaeda invasion, Ansar told me he hoped it would resume in 2015. With ongoing al-Qaeda and Boko Haram attacks in Northern Mali, and neighboring Nigeria, Niger and Libya, however, that didn't happen.
Despite the seemingly modest attendance, the festival stood tall symbolically, visible across the Sahara as a rejection of the jihadis' anti-art revolution, a veritable aircraft carrier of Malian cultural firepower in music and dance but also Sufism and women's rights.
While devout Muslims, the Tuareg women have never taken the veil and wield serious power in their semi-matriarchal society.
If only we, you, me, George Lucas, had joined with Manny, the Tinariwen and Mali's many other musicians, music-lovers and Sufis, either by attending the Festival (my daughter went in 2009 and adored it), marching or organizing in support of Malian music after al-Qaeda OUTLAWED it or supported a film about this dramatic battle between Muslim artists and the anti-art jihadis, perhaps we'd be a bit further along in recognizing, financing and creating our Art War defenses.
Despite the story's rapid disappearance into the maw of current events—severe civil war in Syria, emergence of ISIL, etc, it is critical due to its simplicity—musicians and Sufis trying to stand up for their culture—which is an uncommon in the complexity, rampant corruption and "three-way war" of the Middle East.
In lieu of this story, we have the next best thing: see Sissako's “Timbuktu” and support it for an Oscar.