70%User score 70 percent
The Scarlet and the Black
1983 · Drama · History
User Score
521 votes
A song for freedom.
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.
Recommendations based on this film
CinemaSerf
January 29, 2025
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 story…
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griggs79
August 18, 2025
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…
Read the full review on TMDBReviews are written by the TMDB community, not by Timbuktu's publisher.
