College kids Bah and Batrou seem to have inherited the earth, or at least Mali’s part of it: he’s the descendant of an African chieftain, and she’s the daughter of a military governor. But they’re coming of age during a dictatorship, and as their political activism grows, they soon start to realize who really holds the power. Joining the pot-smoking hippies and uptight generals of Hollywood antiauthoritarian caricatures with particularly pointed (and high-stakes) Malian plot lines, Cissé’s remarkable satire on Africa’s ruling class is by turns fierce, romantic, and ultimately hopeful; the wind, it seems, could indeed be shifting.