Bamako is a 2006 film directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako is an award-winning film director and producer who has often worked in Mali and France. Sissako is, along with Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Djibril Diop Mambety, one of the few filmmakers from Sub-Saharan Africa to reach a measure of international...

, first released at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival

2006 Cannes Film Festival

The 2006 Cannes Film Festival ran from May 17, 2006 to May 28, 2006. Twenty films from eleven countries were in competition for the Palme d'Or. The President of the Official Jury was Wong Kar-wai, the first Chinese director to preside over the jury....

 on May 21 and in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 by New Yorker Films

New Yorker Films

New Yorker Films is an independent film distribution company founded by Daniel Talbot in 1965. It started as an extension of his Manhattan movie house, the New Yorker Theater, after he discovered he was unable to obtain certain foreign titles for exhibition....

 on February 14, 2007.

The film depicts a trial taking place in Bamako

Bamako

Bamako is the capital of Mali and its largest city with a population of 1.8 million . Currently, it is estimated to be the fastest growing city in Africa and sixth fastest in the world...

, the capital of Mali

Mali

Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...

, amid the daily life that is going on in the city. In the midst of that trial, two sides argue whether the World Bank

World Bank

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...

 and International Monetary Fund

International Monetary Fund

The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...

, or perhaps corruption, are guilty of the current financial state of many poverty-stricken African countries.

Danny Glover

Danny Glover

Danny Lebern Glover is an American actor, film director, and political activist. Glover is perhaps best known for his role as Detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film franchise.-Early life:...

, one of the film's executive producers, also guest-stars as an actor in a Western

Western (genre)

The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 film (called Death in Timbuktu

Timbuktu

Timbuktu , formerly also spelled Timbuctoo, is a town in the West African nation of Mali situated north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The town is the capital of the Timbuktu Region, one of the eight administrative regions of Mali...

) that some children are watching on the television in one scene.

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

Istanbul International Film Festival

The Istanbul International Film Festival is the first and oldest international film festival in Turkey, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts , a non-profit organisation. It is held every year in April in movie theaters in Istanbul, Turkey...

 in April 2007

2007 in film

This is a list of major films released in 2007.-Top grossing films:Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top grossing films that were first released in the USA in 2007...

.

See also

• Life and Debt
  Life and Debt
  Life and Debt is a 2001 American documentary film directed by Stephanie Black. It examines the economic and social situation in Jamaica, and specifically the impact thereon of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank's globalization policies...
  
  
• Black Gold
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It provides Perkins' account of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency...
  
  

External links

• Bamako at Metacritic
  Metacritic
  Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
  
  
• Danny Glover talks about Bamako