LIFE ON EARTH/LA VIE SUR TERRE (Mali, 1998, 61 min.), directed by Abderrahmane Sissako; script by Sissako; cinematography by Jacques Besse; sound by Pascal Armant; editing by Nadia Ben Rachid; music by Salif Keita and Anouar Brahem; with Abderrahmane Sissako (Dramane), Nana Babby (Nana), Mohamed Sissako (Father), Bourama Coulibaly (Photographer), Keita Bina Gaoussou (Postmaster), Mahamadou Dramé (Telephone Operator), Moussa Fofana (Radio Guest), Madiaye Traore (Hairdresser), Fodia Coulibaly (Tailor), Madou Mariko (Radio Journalist), Lassina Kané (Radio Engineer), Mahamane Maiga (Journalist of the Spoken Library), Dramane Sissako (Tailor Reading His Letter). In French and Bambara with English subtitles.

What I want is universal hungering, universal thirsting.

My ear to the ground, I hear tomorrow pass. --Aimé Césaire

More important than the message itself is the act of wanting to communicate. -- Abderrahmane Sissako.

Life On Earth was commissioned by the French/Swiss television channel La Sept Arte, as part of a series entitled L'An 2000 Vue Par . . .(The Year 2000 Seen By . . .). Each was to be by a young filmmaker, set in a different country, on a different continent, all set on December 31, 1999. The series of ten films ultimately included works by Hong Kong filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, whose previous work includes The River); Brazil's Walter Salles (Central Station), Belgium's Alain Berliner (Ma Vie En Rose), Canadian actor/screenwriter Don McKellar (The Red Violin, Dance Me Outside), and U.S. director Hal Hartley (Henry Fool). For Africa, the director chosen was the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, whose previous work included the 1997 film Rostov-Luanda.

For his contribution, Sissako chose a deceptively simple premise: What if he left his home in Paris, which in 1998 was already destined to be a major site of millennial celebrations, and went to experience the transition to Y2K in the quiet isolation of his father's village of Sokolo, located in Mali, near the southeastern corner of Mauritania? What a contrast with the Western hoopla over the Millennium! He could give us a slice-of-life of Sokolo, film the daily routine of the villagers in a documentary manner, shed light on this "other" world for Western viewers, and remind us that not everyone will be caught up in the Millennial fever.

He accomplished all this in La Vie Sur Terre, and for many viewers, this is what the film will remain. On the surface it resembles a slice-of-life documentary, but it is more than that. It is really a poem--deeply layered and rich in ambiguity. It juxtaposes gorgeous imagery; evocative and emotionally-compelling music by Salif Keita ("Folon") and Anouar Brahem; a slow, mind-bending pace punctuated by bits of self-deprecating humor and heart-rending laments; a series of repetitive events; lyrical narration by the director; and powerful quotations from the great Martinique poet Aimé Césaire. Its components, we come to realize, are carefully selected. Viewed one way, the film seems barren, empty of plot and drama. Viewed another way, there is almost too much going on. There are connections to be made, both emotional and intellectual. What emerges is a complex rumination on the fate of Africa in this century and the next.

The film opens with the director (he will be known as "Dramane" in the film), shopping in the impossible richness of a Parisian supermarket ("hypermarché"). The image of a huge baobab tree transitions us into the world of Sokolo--its warm yellows and browns in marked contrast to the icy clarity of the supermarket. We hear on the soundtrack the voice of Sissako (and it's a beautiful voice), as his father reads his letter, grinning with delight, in which he tells of his decision to spend the end-of-the-millennium at home in Sokolo. Quoting from Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal Dramane shares his dream: "I'll arrive fresh and young in my country, and tell this country whose dust has penetrated my flesh: 'I wandered for a long time, I now return to your hideous open wounds' . . . Is what I learn far from you worth what I forget about us?" All the while, we hear the plaintive tones of the great Salif Keïta's "Folon."

We will come to know some of the inhabitants of Sokolo. The camera never lingers on one individual or group of individuals for very long. People are constantly passing through town, out into the countryside, herding cattle, riding donkeys, headed somewhere. From time to time, we will see Dramane as he rides his bicycle through the village, again and again, as if in search of something, wheeling around the corners of the mud brick homes, ringing his bell to announce his presence. He will meet another cyclist--Nana, a beautiful young woman from a nearby village, who is staying with her aunt. (The director "discovered" Nana Babby when she accidentally bicycled into a shot; he quickly made her a key part of his film.) We would expect a romance, and the director plays with that expectation, but this is not the film for that. She appears to evoke a languorous yearning in most of the men who see her, but it doesn't go anywhere. A group of men sit listening to the radio in the ever-shrinking shade cast by a building. Eventually, they are obliged to give up and move off with their chairs. A photographer does portraits of people (including Nana), who come and go. A barber cuts hair (when he is not distracted by Nana cycling by) or waits for customers. A tailor works at his sewing machine.. The town's primary agricultural product is rice, but drought has taken most of the harvest, and the villagers must do constant, monotonous battle with huge flocks of small birds for the remainder.

The central life of the Sokolo of this film is the radio station and the post office. It is here that the key thematics of Life On Earth will register. The broadcasters of the tiny local radio station ("Radio Colon, La Voix du Riz") play Malian music and read passages from books such as Aimé Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme: "Africa's historic tragedy was less its coming in contact with the rest of the world too late, than the way this contact occurred. It was when Europe had fallen into the hands of industrial leaders entirely lacking in scruples that it expanded. It was our misfortune that it was this Europe that we encountered." These humble broadcasters are, as it were, the soul of Sokolo. They read poetry, interview ordinary people. One man complains about the birds, which are destroying their crops and leading them to starvation--they cannot kill the birds, because the birds are protected. (By whom? Pressure from the West?) At times, we are in the radio station watching them at work (including the dour engineer who must keep this operation going); at other times we are outside listening to the broadcasts on the radio with the men, or hear it overlaid on other scenes. At other times, it's Radio France International that we're hearing on the radio--hearing about the magnificent millennial celebrations happening in Paris and around the developed world. The contrasts are acute and delicious.

The Post Office is where people come to make telephone calls. We see repeated attempts to do so, by a variety of people, including Nana (trying to phone a man named Bai, her boyfriend?), Dramane, an Arab merchant, a soldier. These attempts are rarely successful. As the postmaster tells Dramane, "It's ringing in England and I'm calling Paris. It's hard to reach people. It's a question of luck." This is the reality of communication in "the bush."

On one level, this is the central theme of the film--the portrait of a place that has been left behind in the millennial fervor of technological accomplishment. There is indeed much that is sad and frustrating about "Life On Earth" here in Sokolo. However, though Sokolo is remote and "backward," it is not cut off from the rest of the world, and the radio and telephones show us that people have a hunger to be in contact with the larger world (and certainly know a lot more about us than we do about them). But the director has no intention of looking to the West for guidance, not a West swelled with technological smugness and millennial self-satisfaction, bathed in the icy light of the "Hyper-Market" that we saw at the beginning of the film. Again quoting Césaire, Sissako has this to say about Europe: "That Europe: Europe convulsed in screams, the silent currents of despair, fearfully pulling itself together and proudly overestimating itself."

No, for the director, if salvation is to come, it will be from Sokolo. Ironically, we see its possibilities in the radio station and in the post office. Looked at from a Western perspective, we see technological primitiveness and lack of capacity. But viewed another way, we are overwhelmed by the caring and supportiveness, the sense of communal solidarity, of these men who are working the technological "interface": the telephone worker who tries every trick he can to help individuals communicate with their loved ones; the disabled postmaster, who is willing to make his painful way across town looking for Dramane, so that he can tell him that his call has come through; the radio announcers who struggle to give the people an alternative to news from the West. There is an unyielding patience and strength to these men.

The film ends with its various "plot" strands unresolved, the millennium passing over Sokolo like a dream. A man sends a despairing letter to his brother in Europe (which Dramane will carry back for him, personal contact still the safest way to communicate), Dramane and his father walk off into the distance, Nana packs her valise and rides off on her bicycle. The villagers battle the birds. Salif Keïta sings the final chords of "Folon." And the film ends with the following poignant words from Aimé Césaire:

We are standing now, my country and me, our hair in the wind. My tiny hand now in its enormous fist. And strength is not in us, but above us, in a voice piercing the night, like the sting of an apocalyptic wasp. The voice proclaims that for centuries Europe has fed us lies and sent us plagues.

For it's not true that man's work is done, that we have no place in this world, that we have to walk in step with the world. Man's work has only just begun. Man has to conquer the forbidden immobilization in the recesses of his fervor. No race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence or on strength. Everyone must find his place when the conquest comes.

Now we know that the sun revolves around our Earth, illuminating the area our will alone has chosen and that every star shoots from heaven to Earth at our command without limits.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

Read California Newsreel's Catalogue Entry on Life on Earth.

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