In Moré Zan boko means "the place where the placenta is buried"-a concept having to do with the way the past gives meaning to the present. Gaston Kaboré tells of the uneasy transition from agrarian peasant life to the formlessness of urbanization in a film whose narrative style reflects the African experience of being jolted into modernity. The first half of Zan Boko introduces us to Tinga, in whose village, just outside the city's stretch, the ways described in Wend Kuuni continue to provide a structure for human relationships, well into modern times. But Tinga's values, and his refusal to sell his land to urban developers, cannot stop a tragedy that greed has set in motion, with no thought to "where the placenta is buried." (The developers and their government cronies are sure to have traditional African art on their walls, however.) The film's second half adopts a kind of helter-skelter social realism to chronicle the fate of a journalist, Yabre, whose uncompromising exposé of the redevelopment scandal finally comes to rest on Tinga himself, before censorship and corruption conspire to silence him.