Sarraounia

SARRAOUNIA, a 1986 film from Burkina Faso screened in the US in 1994, is a low-key historical drama depicting a French officer's frenzied obsession with the subjugation of a defiant tribal sorceress-queen whose armed resistance inspires other tribes to join her. Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo aims less for an emotional saga of indigenous resistance to colonial rule than a series of tableaux offering a dispassionate overview of the different historical forces at work in the colonization of Africa.

In 1898, the French send military expeditions into Central Africa, burning and plundering smaller villages, while sparing the larger Muslim centers in exchange for c...