Twist à Bamako (2021)

Shortly after Mali proclaimed its independence, in 1962, Samba, the son of a wealthy merchant, is a fervent supporter of President Modibo Keita’s socialist regime. Along with a few friends, he travels around the country explaining the virtues of land collectivization to peasants, and encounters hostility from village chiefs. In the evenings, he likes dancing the twist in fashionable clubs. The morning after an appearance in a Bambara village, he and his friends are surprised to find a stowaway in their truck: Lara, a young woman who was forced to marry the village chief’s grandson and wants to go to Bamako. She hopes to return to the French people she worked for before her marriage, but when she reaches their property, the gardener tells her they have left the country. One of Samba’s friends then offers to put her up with his family, and his mother finds her a job. Lara and Samba fall in love and dream of building a life together. Samba wants to believe that reform of the Family Code will give Lara the right to divorce and make forced marriages illegal, but Mariam, one of the members of the commission tasked with revising the law, tells him that attitudes will take time to change. Lara is pregnant by her husband, and Samba says he is willing to consider the child his own. But the government’s reforms, particularly its control of imports and exports and the replacement of the CFA franc with the Malian franc, deeply displease business owners and merchants, who decide to organize a large demonstration that ends with an assault on Bamako’s city hall. Samba’s father is among those arrested and accused of attempting a coup d’état. Samba visits him in prison, but, realizing that he has been beaten and is ready to lie and repeat false accusations as his own, Samba begins to doubt the regime. The socialist government also cracks down on clubs where people dance the twist, seeing them as symbols of Western cultural influence, a challenge to African traditions, and moral depravity. The clubs are therefore shut down. Lara’s employer tries to rape her; she knocks him unconscious as she struggles to resist and finds herself accused. She is ultimately not prosecuted, but the authorities become aware that she is a wife who has run away. Lara’s husband and brother come to Bamako to try to find her, and she has to move. Samba and Lara eventually decide to flee the country. Samba accompanies Lara to the railway station, where she is to take the train to Dakar, but her brother and husband catch up with them there. Lara’s brother stabs Samba to death, and Lara is forced to return to her marital home. Epilogue, in northern Mali, in 2012: Lara is a grandmother and secretly dances the twist with her grandchildren. The Islamists have banned music. Lara has never forgotten her youth—or Samba.