Dirs. Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré; 2022
Like many of his fellow West Africans, Malian photographer, filmmaker, and activist Bouba Touré migrated to France in search of economic opportunity and an improved life. What they found instead were poor-paying jobs, unfit accommodation, and a racist, structurally unequal society. In 1977, a group of these workers—including Bouba Touré—came together and formed Somankidi Coura, a radical farming cooperative in Mali, committed to a return to the land as well as to opposing a brutally extractive and ecologically damaging colonial agricultural policy. Drawing from Bouba Touré’s own rich collection of still and moving images as well as other remarkable archival sources, this film is an extraordinary account of a unique and exemplary endeavor and a generously polyvocal memorial to a utopian moment within the wider postcolonial liberation struggle. (JA)