Abderrahmane Sissako's drama about a town's 2012 takeover by Al Qaeda militants premiered at May's Cannes Film Festival



The Hollywood Reporter is pleased to exclusively premiere the first trailer for this year's best foreign language film Oscar submission from Mauritania, Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu.

The heartbreaking French-language drama, which premiered in competition at May's Cannes Film Festival before making its way to this month's New York Film Festival, centers on the 2012 takeover of the titular town in north Mali by Al Qaeda militants. Mauritanian-born Sissako was raised in Timbuktu, and the namesake project is the second of his five solo directing efforts to be selected for the most prestigious of film fests. There, its North American distribution rights were bought by the Cohen Media Group, which will release it in the U.S. in early 2015.

Its selection for the Oscar competition — making it one of an unusually-high nine films that screened at Cannes this year and were then entered by their home country — has reportedly delighted Mauritanians, including the president of the small west African nation. Prior to this year's entries by Mauritania and Ethopia (Difret), only nine other films from sub-Saharan Africa had ever been submitted: the first, Ivory Coast's Black and White in Color (1976), won the Oscar, but the others weren't even nominated.


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