Movies like Sira are exactly what film festivals should be all about. Thrillingly directed and acted, this film places us in the Sahel region of Northern Africa and makes us all witness to both the horrors and strength of spirt of these people.
When we first meet Sira, she is traveling across the desert with her village members on the way to her wedding to Jean-Side. They decide to stop for a night on the advice of one of the men in the village. This decision proves fateful when on an unplanned stop, a group of extremists attack the caravan and kidnap Sira. After being attacked and abandoned, Sira is left to wander the desert. When she finally finds a camp which gives her hope, it’s quickly dashed upon the realization it’s the location of the men who attacked her. Between fighting for her own survival and the growing feelings of revenge, Sira must find a way to freedom both personal and spiritual.
Writer director Apolline Traoré has got a confident eye for balancing the various elements of her film from the images to the performances themselves. From the opening frame to the final one, Sira has some incredible visual panache and a strong language to move you through the story. Even in some of the most haunting moments are shot with care for the story and play in perfect harmony with the script.
The script for this movie is one I found very fascinating. While on its face it seems to be a sketch of what is occurring in that religion of Africa and a tale of survival, over the course of its run time it unfurls itself into a lovely examination of a wonderful ensemble of characters and the human condition. Traoré manages to find a great balance between small lines and moments that have big pay offs and big moments that send small tremors through the character’s lives. She has also moved away from many tropes, particularly at the end, that would have doomed a film like this. Instead trusting the narrative and the actors serving it, we get a perfectly composed setting for a film to take place.
While the film certainly succeeds at many of its aims, it does manage to stumble a bit. When Sira initially gets to the camp and must find a way to get supplies without being found, the movie reaches a near crescendo of tension. However, the longer she stayed and the longer it took other characters to respond to certain actions, I found myself drifting in attention from the movie and unsuspending my disbelief. In this respect, I found that the film had similar challenges to 12 Years a Slave. Both of these films work as a picture of survival but in terms of an all encompassing experience as the character themselves would feel it, the film falls a bit short. Traoré certainly shows us the markers of time passing with Sira and Jean-Side through changes in their appearance but they seem to be the only ones, and given the propulsive nature of the story and the multiple ensemble character that are serviced, the second half of the movie does drag.
Despite this issue, there’s more than enough here to keep you going thanks to a really incredible ensemble of actors. Nafissatou Cissé is given a Herculean task that would have been impressive even if this wasn’t her debut. She has to shoulder the emotional through line of the film and does so with great aplomb. There’s not a moment where she’s on screen where she isn’t commanding your full attention. When she’s not the focus the movie also rewards us with two fascinating portraits of masculinity with the performances of Mike Danon and Lazare Minoungou. As the first officer of sorts and the leader of this group respectively, these two men chart a fascinating look at war. Both men get standout moments and even though they’re playing two bad men, both give us the human complexity we look for in characters.
Sira is certainly a movie with a powerful message, and it also does well to just be a solid film. Never didactic to the point of being off-putting, but searing, it’s a wonderful triumph of a film that everyone should have a chance to see.