Moolaade

Herald rating: * * * *

Veteran Senegalese director Sembene is a sort of African Ken Loach, a master of film-making that is both vernacular and lyrical, both politically engaged and deeply humanist.

This film, set in the deeply impoverished West African country of Burkina Faso, charts the turmoil that erupts in a small Muslim village when several women rebel against the practice of female genital mutilation (known to the menfolk as purification).

The title refers to a protective spirit, like a tapu, invoked by one of the women to protect the barely pubescent girls sought by the grim, red-robed women who perform the ritual.

Studiously avoiding shrill polemic, Sembene spends much time on the quotidian details of village life - the grinding of grain and fetching of water - but drama bubbles beneath the ordered surface.

Some of the action unfolds with the stylised formality of traditional theatre, using dance and song, but there are grittily naturalistic sequences as well and, while the mutilations are not depicted with gruesome explicitness, we are left in no doubt about the distress it causes.

In the end, it's a film that deals with a perennial theme - the clash between traditional and modern - and Sembene, who wrote and directed, cleverly deploys several plot elements, not least the return of a villager from lucrative travels, to up the ante.

In all, this is a gem of African cinema, that artlessly blends ethnography and politically charged drama and is well worth seeing.

CAST: Fatoumata Coulibaly, Maimouna Helene Diarra, Salimata Traore, Dominique T. Zeida, Mah Compaore, Aminata Dao
DIRECTOR: Ousmane Sembene
RUNNING TIME: 123 minutes
RATING: M, violence, offensive language, sex scenes
SCREENING: Rialto