Bamako(2006)
dir. Abderrahmane Sissako
A Malian courtyard puts the World Bank on trial.
Where to watch: Subscription: MUBI ($14.99/mo), OVID ($6.99/mo); free with library card on Kanopy, Hoopla; rent $3.99 Amazon / $4.99 Apple TV; buy $10.99 (JustWatch US, checked 2026-10-01, re-check). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
In a courtyard in Bamako, Mali, a real trial is staged: African civil society puts the World Bank and the IMF in the dock for the damage done by structural adjustment. Lawyers argue, witnesses testify, and around them the family life of the yard goes on: a singer, a husband and wife whose marriage is breaking, a man building a grave. Sissako lets a western play on a television in the background. It is a film that argues, and is also a film about people.
Why it’s here
It's a film that puts debt and aid on trial, in the courtyard where they land. What's punk is the staging: the powerful are summoned to a poor man's yard and made to answer. What's pedagogical is the way it makes an abstract system concrete, with testimony, cross-examination and the lives around it. Pairs with Debt, The Shock Doctrine and Xala. Note: slow, argumentative and in French and Bambara with subtitles; includes a staged western spoof and an intentionally uncomfortable moment of violence. Sissako's Timbuktu was suggested 10-14.
Where This Film Lives
- Topics
- colonialism
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
Shashi Tharoor
The case against the Raj, as a speech.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James
A plantation, a plot, and the women behind it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
Jason Hickel
Rich countries 'aid' poor ones. Check the ledger.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Research was a colonial tool. Here is the audit.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
Stephen Kinzer
Fourteen regime changes. Fourteen stated reasons.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City
Tanya Talaga
Seven teens left home for school. None came back.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Who decides what counts as history.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
William Dalrymple
The first corporation to conquer a country.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST