Yeelen: Brightness

When I received an announcement from the Vancouver International Film Centre that they were celebrating Black History Month, I was wonderfully surprised. Although intimately familiar with Asian Heritage Month in May, I am embarassed to say that I knew nothing about Black History Month. African director Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen or Brightness, winner of the Cannes Jury Prize in 1987, is the featured film in the series.

The film opens with a rising sun. Then, small prisms shine on a thin wooden pole. This is the magic pylon used by Mali people to find lost things and punish theives or traitors. A chicken hung on the pole bursts into flames. When critics say nothing prepares you for this cinematic experience, they were right. Yeelen is the story of Nianankoro, an up-and-coming magician hated and hunted by his powerful father. Nianankoro embarks on a journey and along the way, he learns about himself, the world, and even gets a taste of the birds and bees.

Trained in Russia and a longtime documentarian, Cissé's film can be seen as a reverse ethnography. Recreating life, rituals and behaviour of the time, the film is a remarkable work of magic realism, in the sense that it depicts magic as everyday fact as well as spiritual knowledge. However, to a young Chinese-Canadian viewer, I felt often distanced and confused by the film's impersonal reconstruction of Mali culture and religion. Yeelen can be compared to Canada's Atanarjuat. Both are categorized in the fantasy genre but are in fact cultural and social documents. To me, Atanarjuat is more accessible and compelling as a film. Instead of promoting cultural understanding, Yeelen makes me feel like an outsider. Interestingly, after leaving the Film Centre, I passed through an opening at the Or Art Gallery and felt a similar sense of detachment from the tribes of artists and groupies.

Yeelen is classic in African cinema and forms an important opposition to colonial perspectives such as a five-minute sequence in David Lachapelle's Rize where he intercuts between anthropological footage of tribal dance and krump dance in South Central LA. So go watch Yeelen, along with other cultural riches the Film Centre has to offer.

Read the New York Times Review of Yeelen.

Learn more about Souleymane Cissé and his other films at the Harvard Film Archive.