Moolaadé

Moolaadé is set in a small village in Burkina Faso, where Collé Ardo has already refused, years earlier, to let her daughter undergo the purification ritual of excision. When several girls flee the ceremony, four of them take refuge in her courtyard and ask her to protect them. She invokes moolaadé, a traditional right of asylum marked by a rope stretched across her entrance, which no one may cross to take the girls away. Her refusal sets the defenders of the custom against those who question it, dividing families and the village council.

Ousmane Sembène directed, wrote and produced the film, which followed Faat Kiné (2001) as the fifth of the features he made. Fatoumata Coulibaly plays Collé Gallo Ardo Sy, with Maimouna Hélène Diarra, Salimata Traoré, Dominique Zeïda, Rasmané Ouédraogo and Joseph Traoré among the cast. Shot in several West African countries with French support, it runs 124 minutes.

Audiences rate it well: 7.6 on IMDb from roughly 4,400 votes and 7.2 on TMDB from a much smaller sample of 77. Critics place it markedly higher, at 8.7 from 74 reviews, a gap suggesting the film was valued more by reviewers than by the wider public.