''Finzan'' / ''A Dance for Heroes'' is a 1989 Malian film, the second feature film directed by
Cheick Oumar Sissoko
Cheick Oumar Sissoko (born 1945 in San, Mali) is a Malian film director and politician.
Biography
As a student in Paris, Cheick Oumar Sissoko obtained a DEA in African History and Sociology and a diploma in History and Cinema from the Ecole ...
. The Malian film critic
Manthia Diawara welcomed the film, which deals with
arranged marriage and
female genital mutilation, as "an impassioned cry for the emancipation of African women
..one of the boldest examples of socially engaged filmmaking to come out of Africa in recent years".
['Finzan: A Dance for the Heroes', ''California Newsreel Library of African Cinema 1995-95 Catalogue'', pp.7-9]
The film opens with a shot of a mother goat nursing her kids, before cutting to a page of statistics from the
World Conference on Women, 1980:
The main character in ''Finzan'' is a widow, Nanyuma, expected by tradition to marry her brother-in-law, Bala. To avoid doing do, she escapes to the city, but is eventually captured, tied up, and sent back. Though forced to undergo the marriage ceremony, she refuses to consummate it, and eventually leaves the village to make her own future. In a subplot, a well-educated young women, Fili, questions
female genital mutilation. In one of the film's final scenes, she Fili is captured by a group of women and forcibly excised.
References
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External links
* {{imdb title, 0121287
Finzanat
African Film Festival, Inc.
1989 films
Malian drama films