A young man who has left the countryside to come to the city, earns his keep by pulling a little cart around, delivering small items for merchants and others. One day he helps the manager of a textile factory deliver some items to his home, and the wealthier man befriends him because he is from the same part of the countryside as he is. This puts him in a position to observe what happens next, for the manager is caught between his exploitative and cruel boss and the workers in the factory, and his sympathies lie with the workers.





I saw this film in 1982 and I still remember it vividly. It is both about the life of an African man, and about the life of anyone who works for a company, and wants to remain true to him or herself.

A young manager of a factory encounters a man walking along a road who says his family traditionally are servants to the manager's family. The manager offers him a job, and as he watches out for the other man's welfare, begins to see how the company mistreats its workers. The manager is challenged between his ethics and the pressure from others to protect his own interests as dire problems surface at the factory. Even when he decides on his path, he finds that fate has a formidable power. (IMDB comment)

Born in Bamako, Mali, in 1940, Souleymane Cissé is one of Africa’s pre-eminent directors, with a varied body of creative work. As a young man, he worked as a photographer and a projectionist in Mali. From 1963 to 1969 he studied filmmaking in Moscow at the State Institute of Cinema, where a number of other future African directors (including the great Ousmane Sembène) received a firm grounding in the technical art of cinema under the accomplished Soviet director Mark Donskoi (!).

Cissé returned to Mali in 1969, where he went to work for the Ministry of Information as a documentary filmmaker. He made his first short fiction film, Five Days in a Life, in 1972, then his first feature, Den Muso/The Young Girl, in 1975. This was followed by Baara/The Porter in 1978, which won the Best Film and Best Actor awards at the Carthage Film Festival, along with major awards at Naumur and Locarno. It was followed by Finyé/Wind in 1982 (which won the Grand Prize at the 1983 Pan-African Film Festival), Yeelen/Brightness in 1987 (which won many international awards, including the Jury Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival), and Waati/Time in 1995.







El trabajo
Ganadora de dos premios en el Festival Internacional de cine de Locarno, Souleymane Cissé nos entrega su película más abiertamente subversiva, en la cual nos narra la historia de un ingeniero que contrataa un amigo como operario en una fábrica donde las precarias condiciones de trabajo y la miserable remuneración que los trabajadores perciben, provocan el estallido de una huelga con la cual los obreros buscan oponerse a la explotación y opresión.







Le travail
C'était le premier long métrage qui était produit à Mali. Il raconte l'histoire d'un jeune homme qui se retrouve dans les tensions croissantes politiques et économiques à l'Afrique urbaine. Balla Diarra est un ouvrier de la capitale Bamako. C'est difficile pour lui de survivre avec son petit revenu. Après la mort de son ami, qui était tué par un insensible chef d'une entreprise il se retrouve de plus en plus face à la violence. Comme ce film se déroule plutôt dans une ville moderne que dans un passé mythique ou une village traditionnelle, il offre un portrait de la vie africaine comme on ne l'a pas souvent vu sur les écrans ouest.





uuuu