With a rare personal appearance by Abderrahmane Sissako, four of his features plus three shorts are at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the fifty-fifth annual Robert Flaherty Summer Film Seminar at Colgate University. The Mauritania-born, Mali-raised, Moscow Institute for Cinema-schooled, Paris-based filmmaker is not so widely known on these shores as warranted by scores of international awards for his hard and yet poetic evocations of contemporary Africa.

Life on Earth/La vie sur terre epitomizes the director-writer’s concern with the traditional and organic community caught against post-colonial modernity. Neither facile nostalgia nor blame-game, not linear story or disassociated vignettes, this sixty-one-minute, commissioned, “first feature-length drama” works without much dialogue on one single day, December 31, 1999, the last of a millennium, like Roman Janus looking back and ahead.

Through its brief introduction in a Paris supermarket-department store, subsequent Radio Sokolo scenes with voiceover news about Eiffel Tower and Tokyo New Year’s Eve celebrations, and incongruous magazine cutouts on African walls -- Charles and Diana, pantyhosed white legs, a Caucasian model -- parallel realms are introduced of the First World capitals as against the somnolent Third World hamlet with its local music tapes. There is gentle humor in this, not anger, as, for example, six male loungers hold transistor radios and move no more than absolutely necessary to keep their chairs from direct sunlight and then fold up entirely and disband when shadows grow too thin.

Contrast is geographical and social, but more striking, exceptionally so, is the use of two, sometimes three layers of depth, from the opening shots of Dramane (Sissako) between more distant consumer shelves of cheap shoes and nearer consumer racks of cheap toys. After he returns to see his father (Mohamed Sissako) in Sokolo, Mali, there are often several visual planes varying with depth of field -- a group of men selling wares or produce foreground and the al fresco photographer (Bourama Coulibaly) in the distance; or a bicyclist riding in front or repairing a tire, and another man sitting erect further away. The two more extreme planes are then bisected by an in-between third, in horizontal movement of goats, cattle, mules or passersby.

Sometimes voiced over via Dramane’s letter to his dignified father, at other moments by the social-more-than-political commentary of writer Aimé Césaire (voice of James Campbell) or by Colonial Radio/”The Voice of the Rice Fields” reporters or a man writing to thank a relative abroad and tell of regional hardships, the theme is one of unhurried relationships. Interaction may be between two women drawing water at a well or boys kicking a ball around it, or in the motif of villagers with infinite patience trying to make invariably unsuccessful telephone calls from the bare post office, or in the photographer’s posing instructions to his portrait sitters or a tailor (Fodia Coulibaly) taking measurements aloud.

Nothing much, or nothing period, happens, the voices are not always easy to place, there is a dangling march of three dozen men that goes nowhere, as do Dramane’s promising but ultimately blank chance meetings with lovely Nana (Nana Baby), arrived from Kourouma to stay at her mother’s house only to pedal off again with a suitcase.

Reflected in an outdoor wall mirror or in one placed for shaving at an open roofless washing-up place, or in narrow adobe-walled lanes or riding above mules’ hindquarters, hesitant villagers are framed through doorways and through the camera lens or lit in golden dust.

At such slow pace, this day would drive an urbanite to distraction. Lacking what is thought of as “event,” however, it is accurately, lovingly filmed, so one easily slides into this world. Of course, one would not want some fate willfully to misunderstand and leave him here forever, not to return to the global village whence he came. 

(Released by Fox Lorber; not rated by MPAA.)