The unlikely friendship between a young worker from the countryside and a progressive factory engineer leads to the triggering of political and class fault lines in Cissé’s searing 1978 drama. Set in Mali’s capital, Bamako, Baara vividly dissects not only how its people work, but how they profit or (more often) lose when pitted against one another—bosses against unions, women against men, and the powerful against the powerless. “Cissé makes explicit the infrastructure of corruption, and captures grand social forces in microcosm . . . in teeming images that fill frames with richly textured action” (Richard Brody, New Yorker).