As we saw in Yaaba, Idrissa Oeudraogo carves a personal style out of the textures of the everyday. In Tilai, shooting in his desert village and using friends and family members as actors, he draws on their humanity with elegant restraint; out of details of gesture and uncluttered dialogue, he builds a story of psychological complexity. A young man, Saga, returns to the village after a two-year absence to find that his fiancée, Nogma, has been taken by his father as a second wife. Meeting Nogma on the sly, Saga becomes a criminal (guilty not only of adultery but of incest) and is sentenced to death. His own brother, slated to perform the execution, risks his own life by faking the killing. But if, in Yaaba, a young boy on the edge of manhood subverted tradition through the clarity of his compassion, in Tilai society's law takes its toll with the inexorability of Greek tragedy or a play by Chikamatsu. "Mr. Ouedraogo is...among the most accomplished of contemporary filmmakers." (Caryn James, New York Times)