Bamako (film)

Accolades

Actress Aïssa Maïga was nominated for the César Award for Most Promising Actress in 2007.

Bamako was the recipient of the first Film Award of the Council of Europe (FACE) given at the Istanbul International Film Festival in April 2007.

Bamako won the award for Best French-Language Film/Meilleur Film Francophone at the Prix Lumière

Bamako was also the winner of the Audience Award at the Paris Cinema in 2006.

Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir selected the film when asked to present one film within the Maryland Film Festival in 2008.

Reception

The film was received a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100 which meant the film was met with critical acclaim. The film has a score of 85% with a certified "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 54 reviews with the consensus being it is "A courtroom drama and a portrait of everyday Mali life, Bamako approaches both subjects with equal skill and success." The film received much praise for its direction by director Abderrahmane Sissako.

Entertainment Weekly gave Bamako an A, calling it "a passionate, challenging drama from the fine Mauritanian writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako" and that it brings "moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits".

A. O. Scott from The New York Times said that "he has never seen a film quite like "Bamako" and praising the director Abderrahmane Sissako's vision as a "seething, complicated and a disarmingly beautiful investigation of Africa’s social, economic and human crises" and going on to describe the film as "something different, a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem".

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune in his review gave the film 3 1/2 stars out of 4 and said "Sissako has an unusual camera eye, patient and alert to the ebb and flow of both the courtroom sequences and the outside scenes. The music is wonderful as well."

Wesley Morris from the Boston Globe in an overwhelmingly positive review said "As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate."

The Empire review gave the film 4 out of 5 stars and said that the film is "Far from an easy watch, either in terms of its hard-hitting content, seemingly haphazard structuring or its dense symbolism. But this makes sense of the political intricacies by balancing the rhetoric and statistics with everyday occurrences that give the iniquities and inadequacies a human face."

The review in The Washington Post said "No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako."