Timbuktu

Abderrahmane Sissako's fourth feature competed at Cannes in 2014 and then swept the Césars, taking seven including Best Film and Best Director — the first time a film by a director from sub-Saharan Africa had done so. It was financed in France and shot in Mauritania, standing in for the Malian city occupied by jihadist groups in 2012.

The film moves between the occupiers issuing their rulings and the people living under them: a herder and his wife and daughter camped in the dunes, a fishmonger who refuses to wear gloves, a group of boys who play a football match without a ball because footballs have been banned. That scene, filmed in wide shot on a dusty pitch, is the most quoted in the film and the clearest statement of its method — resistance as something small, absurd and continuous.

Sofian El Fani, who shot Blue Is the Warmest Colour, gives the landscape a stillness that makes the interruptions land harder. Critics were near-unanimous, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is the most humane film in the catalogue about religious authoritarianism, largely because it insists on the ordinariness of everyone in the frame.