While it's rare to get the opportunity to view slavery from a non-Western perspective, it's rarer still to see the likes of Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M'bala's powerful Adanggaman, which pointedly leaves out Westerners altogether. A searing indictment of African complicity in the slave trade, the film premiered to controversy at the Fespaco Film Festival in Burkina Faso, with some critics complaining that it absolves European colonialists of responsibility for their misdeeds. Yet M'bala doesn't deny the existence of European slave traders: On the contrary, the dreaded "voyage across the ocean" is talked about in hushed tones, giving them an ominous off-screen presence. By keeping them outside the frame, he effectively purifies the issue, starkly incriminating the African leaders who contributed to the enslavement of their own people while hinting at the related forms of exploitation that continue today. M'bala's bold historicism, supported by unvarnished imagery and an emotive soundtrack of African vocal music, compensates for much of his dramatic clumsiness, which tends toward on-the-nose dialogue and the sort of false speechifying that can only come from 20th-century hindsight. Set in West Africa in the late 17th century, Adanggaman refers to a greedy, despotic king (Rasmane Ouedraogo) who sends his Amazon warriors to torch the local villages and round up the inhabitants for auction. The strongest and most able-bodied among them will make the journey across the ocean, the weakest will be sold to area farmers, and the rest—including the elderly, the infirm, and children under six—face execution. Before his village falls to the king's burgeoning empire, Ziable Honoré Goore Bi, a rebellious and freedom-loving young man, stares down tribal pressure to leave his girlfriend and marry a woman with "noble blood." Of course, such distinctions quickly become meaningless when Bi returns from the wilderness to find his entire tribe either killed or rounded up in chains and iron collars. Upon discovering his father and girlfriend dead, Bi sets out to free his mother, even if it means offering himself as trade bait for the tyrannical king. His head-slapping naivete about the leader's trustworthiness is a screenwriter's convenience, as is an unconvincing development involving an Amazon warrior's dramatic change of heart. But Adanggaman excels at detailing the inner workings of the slave market, where prisoners are kept in pens like animals and often sold for same on the auction block. Though M'bala is guilty of imposing a conspicuously modern point of view on events that took place more than three centuries ago, he also sees the connection between African complicity in slavery and the opportunistic leaders who currently offer their people for exploitation. More than just a memorial for African martyrs, Adanggaman confronts the sins of the past in a way that vitally rhymes with the present.