TMDb lists Timbuktu as a French film — a legacy of TMDb’s rigid, funding-based categorisation system. But that’s a bureaucratic fiction. Timbuktu was shot in Mauritania, directed by a Mauritanian (Abderrahmane Sissako), and submitted by Mauritania for the Oscars. To deny it as a Mauritanian film is to prioritise production money over cultural authorship — a quietly colonial impulse that continues to erase African voices from their own stories. Cinema is more than contracts and credits. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
Timbuktu is a film of quiet fury, showing how a city famed for its culture is smothered by self-appointed guardians of morality. Abderrahmane Sissako avoids easy sensationalism, instead dwelling on the absurdity and cruelty of daily life under jihadist rule: women punished for singing, men forced into marriages, lives upended by diktats as arbitrary as they are brutal. The tone is restrained, which makes the eruptions of violence and despair cut deeper.
One sequence distils the whole film. Football is banned, so a group of boys play with an invisible ball. They run, feint, pass, score — every gesture perfectly timed without a single object on screen. It’s funny and joyous, yet heartbreaking, a rebellion powered by imagination alone. That invisible ball becomes a symbol of resilience: culture cannot be outlawed when it lives in the body and the mind.
And perhaps that’s the parallel: the militants seek to erase culture with guns, whilst TMDb does it with metadata. In both cases, identity is overwritten, but resistance finds ways to play on.
