The Law

Tilai

The unbending nature of village law wreaks havoc upon a family in this film from the African nation of Burkina Faso.

A young man has fallen in love with and become engaged to a young woman. But his father swiftly exercises his customary parental prerogatives, and marries the girl instead. Now the boy's fiance has officially become his mother, and his father's second wife.

The distraught lovers flee the village but are actively sought by the otherwise easygoing village authorities for having (technically) committed the crime of incest.

Winner of a Grand Jury Prize and nominated for a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

"The theatrical rhetoric that [Idrissa Ouedraogo] underplays in speech bursts into his images, which are as poised and majestic as they are starkly analytical." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker