Sirga is a remarkable film that lives in the confluence of myth, history, and natural wonders. Though based on a story written by a Frenchman, it contains elements of traditional stories and legends that one can find throughout the African continent. Like Adanggaman, the film from the Ivory Coast that we saw two weeks ago, it is set against the painful backdrop of the internal slave trade, and it too displays the power of traditional wisdom in the face of displacement and disruption. But it adds another dimension--the miraculous power that humans can find in their kinship with the natural world. With lions who serve as friends and guides, snakes who protect, bees that heal, spiders that foretell the future, and wind that can destroy and transport, this film creates a web of magic, traditional healing, and ancestral wisdom.

The film opens with images of children being led away as slaves by an army of mounted soldiers dressed in blue. They are presumably Tuaregs, the fierce pastoralist raiders of the West African Sahel and Sahara regions (present-day Mauritania and Mali), who controlled the trade routes between the Arabs of the north and sub-Saharan Africa. They frequently engaged in slave-raiding among their neighbors to the south, either retaining these slaves for their own service or selling them to the people living in and beyond the Atlas mountains to the north. Like the Arabs to the north, they were Muslim, and their slaves were immediately "converted" to Islamic faith and customs.

One of the children, a boy named Oulé, has a gunshot wound to the shoulder (his captors are berated for having "ruined the merchandise." He has a close bond with Léna, who admires and adores him, but can do nothing to help him. They are eventually taken north to the Atlas mountains of present-day Morocco, where they are delivered into the service of the Prince in his splendid castle.

The film then takes us back in flashback (via Léna's narration) to Pama, the home village of the two children. (The village of Pama exists in present -day Burkina Faso, though the filmmakers shot these scenes in the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe.) We learn that the villagers of Pama lived in perfect harmony with the animals that surrounded them. Oulé's father, Moko Kaoura, a hunter and village leader; has a particular closeness with lions. His mother, Tamani, has the snake sign, and enjoys a special relationship with the snakes of the region. These relationships give them special wisdom and power, and Oulé will inherit these gifts from both.

Before Oulé's birth, the soothsayers had prophesied that there would be twins born in Pama. There were two mothers-to-be at the time--Tamani and Ouara, Queen of the lions. As it turned out, each would have only one child--Oulé, the human child, and Sirga, a female lion cub. But as fate would have it, Oulé and Sirga are brought together and become in effect litter-mates, spiritual twins, and inseparable companions. As they grow older, Oulé is able to learn all of the hunting secrets that Ouara has shared with Sirga (and in traditional Africa, the hunter , with his ability to "read" the natural world, often possesses great magical powers). He can even roar like a lion, to the point that Ouara can be tricked into thinking that it is her own daughter calling. He is clearly no ordinary child.

The special bond that exists between Oulé and Sirga eventually arouses the jealousy of young Léna, who wants Oulé to play with her and care about her. Her jealousy sets off a chain of events that will lead to the departure of Sirga from the surroundings and, sadly, from Oulé's life. (In her young mind, these events appear to have been "caused" by her secret "wishes"; she later realizes that they were fated to occur--the harmonious relationship between humans and animals was in fact fragile at best.) Once the lions have left, the village loses its special protection, in effect its soul. The old people see doom coming to Pama, and inevitably it does, in the form of the slave-raiders.

When we return to the Prince's castle in the north, Oulé is determined to escape and, with Léna, to return to his ancestral home. He has been told, "Never forget that you have the lion's strength within you. As long as you live, Pama will live." His duty is to restore his home and his people. But how to accomplish this, with his gravely wounded shoulder, one small boy among all the Prince's soldiers, so impossibly far from his homeland?

Fortunately, he is not as helpless as he appears, for he carries within himself great powers. With those powers, and with the help of his friends in the natural world, he is able to heal himself, wield the tremendous power of fire and wind, take control of his fate, and transport himself and Léna back to Pama, where Sirga--and a restored union between animals and humans--awaits them.

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Patrick Grandperret has long been associated with the French director Luc Besson, and under the latter's tutelage he made two shorts before tackling this immensely ambitious project, an adaptation of René Guillot's novel Sirga la lionne . (Guillot, an expatriate Frenchman who taught and lived for many years in West Africa, has written a number of novels and stories set in Africa.) Shooting lasted over a year and included locations in four African countries (Ivory Coast, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Morocco), as well as some interiors and process work in France. Most of the actors, including the two children in the lead roles, were non-professional, but the performances are uniformly convincing.

After completing Sirga, Grandperret went on to do an adaptation of another Guillot story, Le Maître des éléphants (The Elephant Master), completed in 1995.

Sirga will leave viewers scratching their heads at the animal-handling involved in some of these scenes--lions cavorting with the infant Oulé, bees swarming around and healing him, a cobra that allows itself to be handled by the boy. We can only marvel at the courage of young Mathurin Sinze, who plays Oulé, and the director who is able to get that performance out of him.

But this film is more than just another Jungle Book or Lion King. . In addition to its scenes with the animals, there are stunning, haunting images throughout, and powerful original music by the great Malian musician Salif Keïta, who has a small role as a griot in the film. It is a film that captures the soul of traditional Africa, hints at the many tragic challenges that this traditional wisdom has faced over the centuries, and reminds us that we forget this wisdom at our own peril.x

--Notes by Michael Dembrow