7. Timbuktu
A scintillating, enraging and ultimately desperately moving, inside-out account of living under the impossible strictures of an Islamic fundamentalist authority, Abderrahmane Sissako’s powerful “Timbuktu”. With world events conspiring to keep the threat posed by Muslim fundamentalist groups top of mind and Western mass media complicit in attempting to reduce that narrative to a series of us/them, Christian/Muslim binaries, “Timbuktu” if anything has increased in relevance and importance, allowing those of us far removed from the realities of that situation to understand that the most immediate victims of these regimes are ordinary Muslim Africans, their villages invaded and their lives, livelihoods and family structures subjugated to the brutal faux-piety of the invaders. But the film is not just political, it’s personal and even beautiful at times in the unblinking way it portrays life’s efforts to struggle through the heaviest of sanctions: it’s sad and lovely and angry all at the very same time.