At the last Cannes Festival this past May Abderrahmane Sissako's slow burn-tale about a town's descent into Islamist hell was the first movie I saw. By the end of fest (that is, about fifty movies later), "Timbuktu" waded around my brain like a very sweet but anxiety-inducing dream I once had. It's now nearly a year later now and director Sissako has triumphed as France's best filmmaker, getting some well-deserved recognition

Good, marketable cinema usually comes from the same continents over and over again. Countries in those continents have support structures that ensure that out of the lot some film school graduates are going to become great filmmakers. The reverse of this seems to be true, too. People desirous of becoming filmmakers but who have the misfortune of being born in countries such as Laos, Nigeria or North Korea and who have