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A Biblical story of wrath and vengeance unlike anything you may have heard at Sunday School. Prodigiously talented filmmaker Cheik Oumar Sissoko sets his story 300 years after the Great Flood that soaked all but Noah. Rivalries and disputes over tradition are tearing once peaceful clans apart. Certainties and restraints have crumbled; a younger generation, respecting no law, piles havoc upon rape, rape upon murder. Esau, the fiercest of the old leaders (played by world music star Salif Keita) watches, hidden in craggy mountains, waiting for his own chance at plunder and revenge. The Genesis is Sissoko's allegorical meditation on his region's simmering tribal conflicts. The movie strips away the clan patriarchs' prophetic mystique to portray them as hotheaded clan leaders, highly emotional and argumentative. Majestically picturesque, it bursts with passion and colour, the rainbow hues of costume and adornment exploding out of a beautiful, arid landscape that burns fiercely into our vision. The Genesis has incredible impact with its photography alone. Masterful cinema.