Wend Kuunin

The film, being nostalgic in character, takes its leitmotif from the 218th frame in the exchange between Bilal and the old lady in the fields who were grumbling about the lack of good upbringing of the young, and the audacity that the wife of Bilal had to declare before the entire village that her husband was impotent: “Times have changed my son – Dunya Teme”.
The film’s narrative thrust, apart from the brief spells of voice narration about ancient Africa (63), the voice narration about the edict of the king to search the entire country for the parents of the lost child (46), the voice narration of the fact that Wend Kuuni had a terrible past that haunted him (139-140), is basically mimetic and homiodiegetic in nature, making the narrative

Wend Kuuni’s inability to speak meant that he had to respond with gestures at the many probing questions of Poignèré. It was Poignèré who told Wend Kuuni about a dream she had, in which Wend Kuuni regained his speech. That prophecy came true in very bizarre circumstances surrounding the suicide of Bilal who could not withstand the shame in the wake of his wife’s (Timpoko) open declaration in a quarrel in the village that he was an impotent man. The friendship between Wend Kuuni and Poingèré grew with more and more frequent visits of Poignèré to the fields where he was tending the flock, even after the repeated warnings of her mother who never wanted her to wander that far. Initially, there were brief spells of exchanges in which Wend Kuuni hurriedly dispatched her home for fear of incurring her mother’s wrath. As Poingèré’s visits continued, staying much longer each time, their exchanges got into a variety of themes and topics: the world in which they lived, the social taboos of girls not allowed to wander into the bushes, the world of the spirits etc. It was also Poingèré who first noticed that Wend Kuuni had regained his speech on that fateful night when he ran home in fear to report the suicide of Bilal. The climax of their exchange was when Poignèré, in her last visit, as part of the closing episodes of the film, asked

Koudbilla’s pitiful state with her sick kid in the hut gives the scenes that connects the opening episode of the film in which she was weeping inconsolably. She is still missing her husband and was finding it difficult to cope with taking care of her only sick son.