Thursday 2nd October
YAABA
(Idrissa Ouedraogo, Burkina Faso/Switzerland/France 1989, 90 mins)

Burkina Faso: across a stark desert landscape a young boy and girl, Bila and Nopoko, play hide and seek. Bila makes friends with an old woman who is an outcast from their village, calling her Yaaba (grandmother) and turning to her for help when Nopoko falls ill, even though the rest of the village blame her supposed evil powers for the illness.
The strength of Yaaba is the elegant restraint of a visual style which manages to be both intimate and detached at the same time. Ouedraogo makes the old lady into a kind of life principle: wisdom, endurance and integrity are seen to be literally etched into her heavily lined face. Meanwhile the routines and petty jealousies of village life go on with a gentle movement of their own. This is a deliberately timeless, mythic tale. Cinematically beautiful, it’s radical in that it depicts an African community without any reference to Europe/The West and asserts the right to explore the frailties, strengths, dilemmas and joys of the human condition through this particular location.
The Pan African Development and Education Advocacy Programme (PADEAP) is sponsoring this screening and a representative will speak briefly about their work.

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