Timbuktu

"A song for freedom."

2014 1h 36m FR

👍

7.0

SOLID

★7.0TMDB · 529

DramaWar

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

Just outside of the Malian city of Timbuktu, now occupied by militant Islamic rebels who impose the Sharia on civilians and inconvenience their daily life, a cattleman kills a fisherman.

“A song for freedom.”

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Cast

Ibrahim Ahmed
Kidane
Toulou Kiki
Satima
Layla Walet Mohamed
Toya
Abel Jafri
Abdelkrim
Kettly Noël
Zabou
Hichem Yacoubi
Jihadist
Mehdi A.G. Mohamed
Issan
Fatoumata Diawara
Singer

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
Writers: Abderrahmane Sissako, Kessen Tall
Languages: French, Bambara, English, Arabic
Countries: France

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

ERA

Did you know

Released 12 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

WORLD

Did you know

Dialogue crosses 4 languages: French, Bambara, English, Arabic.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, shot by Sofian El Fani. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Amine Bouhafa. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Nadia ben Rachid shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Ibrahim Ahmed and Toulou Kiki and Layla Walet Mohamed carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

FACT

Did you know

Marketing tagline: "A song for freedom.".

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt3409392 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Abderrahmane Sissako directs. Sofian El Fani behind the camera. Amine Bouhafa scores. Nadia ben Rachid cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in France. Dialogue in French, Bambara, English, Arabic.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Released 12 years ago.
2Dialogue crosses 4 languages: French, Bambara, English, Arabic.
3Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, shot by Sofian El Fani. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Original score by Amine Bouhafa. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
5Editor Nadia ben Rachid shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
6Ibrahim Ahmed and Toulou Kiki and Layla Walet Mohamed carry the top of the cast.
7Marketing tagline: "A song for freedom.".
8IMDB entry: tt3409392 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Classified under 10 themes, including "civil war", "cattle", "religious fundamentalism", "religious conflict".

The technical file

Cinematography: Sofian El Fani
Original score: Amine Bouhafa
Editing: Nadia ben Rachid
Production design: Sébastian Birchler
Costume design: Ami Sow
VFX supervisor: Stéphane Bidault
Sound: Thierry Delors
Runtime: 96 min · 1h 36m
Status: Released
Box office: $1,076,075
Original language: FR
IMDB: Timbuktu (2014)

Awards

Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Cannes
François Chalais Prize
Grand Prix
Lumière Award for Best Director
Lumière Award for Best Film
César Award for Best Film

Individual records documented via Wikidata; the summary above may count more.

Also by

Abderrahmane Sissako

Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

Community reviews

What people are saying

CinemaSerf2025-01-29
★ 7/10
Not being a man of any religiosity at all, the effects seems to me all the more potent when a group of Jihadists arrive in this town and start to impose Sharia law. Now I don't wish to get all political here, but what we see for the next ninety minutes or so offers us some of the most appalling and disturbing scenes I've ever seen in a fact-based film. It's presented in an effective docu-drama style and follows storylines that see the townsfolk fall foul of their uninvited new regime. To add some context, one man gets 20 lashes for playing football - because it is banned. A woman receives many times that for being in a room with another man. Inappropriate laughing is prohibited as are cigarettes for certain people, too. For the men the rules are harsh, for the women they are controlling and disrespectful offering reinforcement of an historically cultural and societal view that women are property to be traded as required. More seriously, when a cattle herder murders a fisherman who has killed one of his life-endowing cows, we get a sense of the eye-for-an-eye mentality that prevails, coupled with the concept of "blood money". The ritual burying of two people in the sand so they can be stoned by their peers is toe-curling. The film depicts situations that beggar belief at just about every turn. The drama isn't graphic and the acting probably isn't going to turn your head - except, perhaps, for Ibrahim Ahmed's cowman "Kidane" - individually, but the whole ensemble effort conveys a scenario that oppresses the very soul of this community and those watching. The random nature of the judicial process, such as it is, would be laughable were it not so arbitrary. Now it does emphasise the ridiculous and the brutal to make it's point and there is little sense of balance here and that does incline me to think that director Abderrahmane Sissako has some skin in this game. Has he a story of his own to tell? There can be benefits to a stable society that respects the rules and tenets of it's faith - but when the rules start telling you you can't kick a ball, then maybe it's time to wonder whether God hasn't more important things to worry about. That's the crux here, so many of these actions are carried out in His name as was the world of Christianity a millennium ago and paganism the one before that. Ought we not to have learned something about extreme forms of zealousness and dogma by now? It's not an easy watch, this, but it certainly makes you appreciate the benefits of a secular society and it's freedoms - flawed as they are.
griggs792025-08-18
★ 8/10
TMDb lists Timbuktu as a French film — a legacy of TMDb’s rigid, funding-based categorisation system. But that’s a bureaucratic fiction. Timbuktu was shot in Mauritania, directed by a Mauritanian (Abderrahmane Sissako), and submitted by Mauritania for the Oscars. To deny it as a Mauritanian film is to prioritise production money over cultural authorship — a quietly colonial impulse that continues to erase African voices from their own stories. Cinema is more than contracts and credits. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. Timbuktu is a film of quiet fury, showing how a city famed for its culture is smothered by self-appointed guardians of morality. Abderrahmane Sissako avoids easy sensationalism, instead dwelling on the absurdity and cruelty of daily life under jihadist rule: women punished for singing, men forced into marriages, lives upended by diktats as arbitrary as they are brutal. The tone is restrained, which makes the eruptions of violence and despair cut deeper. One sequence distils the whole film. Football is banned, so a group of boys play with an invisible ball. They run, feint, pass, score — every gesture perfectly timed without a single object on screen. It’s funny and joyous, yet heartbreaking, a rebellion powered by imagination alone. That invisible ball becomes a symbol of resilience: culture cannot be outlawed when it lives in the body and the mind. And perhaps that’s the parallel: the militants seek to erase culture with guns, whilst TMDb does it with metadata. In both cases, identity is overwritten, but resistance finds ways to play on.