Yeelen

Yeelen, released internationally as Brightness, is a 1987 Malian film written and directed by Souleymane Cisse, drawing on Bambara oral traditions and the Komo secret society's mythology to tell the story of Nianankoro, a young man whose growing magical powers put him in flight from his tyrannical sorcerer father, who has vowed to kill him before he can surpass him in strength. Shot in the Malian countryside in the Bambara language and using its own visual grammar for depicting supernatural power, the film was praised for translating a specific West African cosmology onto film without an ethnographic or explanatory framing for the outside viewer. It won the Jury Prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, the first sub-Saharan African film to win a major Cannes award.