Opening with a Malian student standing alone in the
suffocating aisles of a French supermarket, Abderrahmane Sissako's 61 minute
debut feature, Life on Earth, quickly
leaves Europe for Africa, following the student as he returns to the small,
remote village of his childhood in search of his fading African identity. On
arrival, Sissako, both director and actor, simply observes a day in the life of
the village and its people, as the promise of a new millennium approaches: people
use the only phone in the village to wish friends and relatives across the
world a happy new year; a DIY radio show broadcasts excerpts from poet Aimé
Césaire's
essay on the negative impact of European colonialism, Discourse on Colonialism; farmers fight to keep flocks of birds
from destroying their crops; a young woman has her photo taken.
Sissako doesn't really create a narrative out of these moments,
instead using them to give a sense of this close-knit community on the precipice
of modernity, but not quite there: the telephone barely works, frustrating
callers with poor reception and long-winded dialling methods; and everyone in
the village uses either donkeys or bicycles for transportation, with only the
briefest glimpse of cars and motorcycles as they pass along the road. And then
the millennium passes, unnoticed by the villagers: bicycle tyres still get
punctures, birds still destroy crops, telephones still don't work; life in 2000
is exactly the same as in 1999.