Issiaka Kane has one performance that matters, and it is a good one: Niankoro in Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen (1987), a young sorcerer played with such stillness that the magic looks like something happening to him rather than something he does.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Kane does not do in Yeelen. When the king demands a demonstration, Niankoro gives it, and then looks at the result as though somebody else had produced it. Cissé shoots his people plainly, in long takes and hard sun, and Kane gives him a face that never asks to be admired. He came to the film from Bamako theatre and dance rather than from acting, and it shows in the right way: he moves through the rites like a dancer and says his few lines as though nobody were listening.
That is the whole of the performance and, so far as we can judge, the whole of the reputation. Cissé cast a non-professional as the lead in a story about a son with his family's gift and a father who wants it back, and the risk paid. Kane plays Niankoro as a serious boy with no idea of his own strength, which is exactly what the film needs, since the film is not about a character learning but about a figure passing through a landscape. Some have complained that the sparse dialogue and the ritual leave him little to develop. We think that misreads the job. He is not there to grow; he is there to be looked at, and to look back.
He is helped by the company. Balla Moussa Keita's Rouma Boll gives the middle stretch its warmth and gives Kane someone to react to, and Aoua Sangare's Attou matches his quiet with her own. The moment we keep returning to is not a rite at all but the aftermath of one: a young man who has just been shown what he is, standing very still, and we felt something close to pity for him. Nothing in the framing tells us to. Kane does it with his shoulders.
After Yeelen he did not go abroad and become a face for hire. He stayed in Mali and worked in West African features through the 1990s and 2010s, among them Fantan fanga (1996) and Cheick Oumar Sissoko's La Genèse (1999), which moves the Book of Genesis to a Malian setting. We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view. He is still involved in local theatre troupes, which is where he started.
So there is one film to see, and it is worth the evening. See it for the face, not the plot, and do not wait for him to do something; the point is that he lets things be done to him, and holds.
