Art house: God's Gift is a captivating filmic fable

West Africa is home to the griots - oral storytellers, historians, guides, entertainers and, most essentially, keepers of traditions and knowledge. They are bards for narratives that are never written but simply passed down orally.

Gaston Kaboré's captivating God's Gift (aka Wend Kuuni) is an example of that tradition translated into film's vocabulary. The 1982 film from Burkina Faso won the 1985 César Award for best French language film and is a landmark in the under-explored realm of African cinema.

A mute young boy (Serge Yanogo) is found by a traveller who takes him to a local village, where he is adopted by a man who weaves fabrics. They name him Wend Kuuni, a gift from god in Mòoré (one of the major languages spoken in the area), for the circumstances in which he arrived. Settled in his new life and family, Wend Kuuni spends his time working, tending a herd of sheep, whittling a flute. He becomes older brother to a sister (Rosine Yanogo) who clearly yearns for more than the standard role and duties of the village's women.

It's an almost idyllic, Eden-like existence in a pre-colonial time that a narrator vaguely reveals as "before the white man's arrival ... when no one was hungry and all lived in peace". It's a subsistence-level simple existence, but no one is unhappy. Well, almost no one.

The only drama is a domestic dispute between an old man and his young wife. Their argument doesn't just disrupt but disturbs the entire village's calm.

The life Kaboré depicts in God's Gift is far different from images of Africa we often see in the news: war, famine and desperation.