Name: Tilaï
Director: Idrissa Ouedraogo
Released: 1990
Duration: 81 min

An adulterous love affair brings tragedy to a traditional village in Burkina Faso in Idrissa Ouedraogo’s masterful, Cannes-awarded fable, now restored in 4K.

When Saga returns home after an absence of two years, he’s dismayed to learn that his fiancée, Nogma, has married someone else – his father. Her feelings for Saga haven’t waned, she reassures him, but she had no choice in the matter. Reunited, they find temptation too great to resist: in the straw hut where Saga is staying, just outside the village, he and his would-have-been bride discreetly consummate their courtship. But this transgression is discovered – per tribal law, treated as not just adultery but also incest – fracturing both family bonds and the broader community.

Like Idrissa Ouedraogo’s two earlier features, Yam Daabo and Yaaba (MIFF 1990), Tilaï features non-professional actors selected from among his family and friends; the film also offers a potent distillation of complex social dynamics set against a backdrop of expansive plains – the filmmaker’s native lands looming mythically in stark compositions – and ancient moral codes. Having originally screened in 1990 at both MIFF and Cannes, where it shared the Grand Jury Prize, Tilaï returns newly restored, its modernist take on a story steeped in patriarchal tradition as striking today as it was decades ago.

“Tilaï unfolds with the stateliness and inevitability of Greek tragedy – but with lots more humour … as exhilarating an experience as it is haunting.” – Los Angeles Times