Yaaba

Few films are as fresh and simple as “Yaaba”, even fewer come as close to perfection. Set in a few flat, sunbaked hectares around a village in Burkina Faso the story is told with the directness of fable with little dialogue, and with the four-square photography confined to three colours - brown, blue and green. The central generation gap story is enriched with incidents of village life so that a vast range of human behaviour and experience is packed in without any sense of haste or padding. The result is not an example of naive cinema but a film whose technical and aesthetic sophistication is presented with an uncloying charm.