For the past five years, directors from Mali have been invited to all the major sections at Cannes. Souleymane Cisse's Waati, the story of a South African girl coming of age while travelling through western and southern Africa, competed at Cannes in 1995. Two years later, Abdoulaye's Ascofare's Faraw (Woman Of The Sands), about a woman looking after her disabled husband while raising her children, was invited to Critics' Week. The same year, Adama Drabo's Taafe Fanga, with its focus on an oral tradition that relates how women take power by appropriating the masks made by men, was well received in the Directors' Fortnight. This year, Cheick Oumar Sisoko's La Genèse (Genesis) can be seen in Un Certain Regard.

Born in Mali in 1955, Sisoko studied African history at the University of Paris and cinema at IDHEC, then returned home to found the Centre National de Production Cinematographique (CNPC) in Bamako. After a documentary on drought and rural depopulation (1984), he directed a trio of feature films that placed him in the forefront of black African cinema. Garbage Boys (1986) depicts the plight of deprived school kids who turn to garbage-collecting to survive. In Finzan (1989), a young widow, who was forced into her first marriage, rebels against the tradition of having to marry her dead husband's brother. And Guimba (1995), nearly blocked by the Mali government during filming, is a historical allegory about sexual power in a pre-colonial African empire.

Genesis, the biblical story of Jacob and his sons, takes on extra colour in a Mali context: traditional native garb, African social customs, local architecture. The setting is a reconstructed Mali stone village where three communities - farmer-peasants, animal-raisers, and hunters - are shown to be constantly in conflict with each other. "In fact," says Sisoko, "it's rare in Mali not to see a farming village that doesn't neighbour on another village of animal-raisers, with the resulting conflicts almost predestined." Esau is played by Salif Keita, a popular Mali singer. Ron Holloway