Banel & Adama (2023) User Reviews

Colorful, ambitious, and full of fables

[chenp-54708 · 7/10 · 5 May 2024]

First, I appreciate the filmmaker crafting an poetic narrative about love, culture, and it's honesty deception of Senegalese culture with some of the most gorgeous camerawork, color presentation, and musical soundtrack. The characters of Banel and Adama are explored pretty good that understand their actions, traditions, feelings, and the issues they are facing within their community and home that helped developed their arches and keep them engaged throughout.

With good performances, many atmospheres and themes are good and the magical realism, romance, and warm style choices are wonderful. It's narrative conveys a emotional development to it's character pretty well but I did wish the writing is able to be better because there are some aspects that were uneven and felt too thin. Including some cultural moments and traditions that I personally thought could have been explored a bit more.

But I applaud director Ramata-Toulaye Sy being able to craft something unique and I am interested to see what else she offers in the future.

Fable in color

[thebeachlife · 10/10 · 19 July 2023]

This very beautiful and rich in color fable tells us about a young couple who live in a primitive Senegalese village and apparently have been in love with each other since they were kids. Without knowing that, Banel is a desperate female rights activist for herself: she's ambitious, rebellious, direct, honest and strong. However, Adama though sharing Babel's vision is more subjected by what customs dictate to him. Additionally, the village (as well as the world) is facing a climate crisis so decisions have to be made now. The cattle die of scorching heat, food and water is scarce. The villagers find their salvation in a Muslim prayer, but will it help?

The film brings up a lot of modern topical issues regardless of the fact that the village community dwells in the old times.

Who will hear Babel's voice? Won't it be too late?

Masterful African presentation

[martinpersson97 · 10/10 · 2 February 2024]

The countries of Africa are sometimes overlooked, but indeed a very fruitful place for filmmaking, having provided many masterful and unique films throughout the years. This is yet another great testament to the provice of said filmography.

The actors all do an incredible job, very career defining, and very vast range, makes you eager to see more of them. All of this accompined by a very imaginative, incredible, and emotional script for the ages, very unconventional, very well paced and overll splendidly written.

The cinematography, cutting and editing is very unique, and befitting of the tone of the film, indeed very beautifully put together.

Overall, definitely an incredible film, that is very much recommended for any lover of film!