Lest the very idea that a film on the subject of genital mutilation could be joyous seems impossible, please set that notion aside. In this powerful fable from African director Ousmane Sembene, one woman’s strength and courage provide the enzyme for an entire village to break tradition and end the centuries-old practice of female castration. Uncluttered images of village life, its people, animals, tidy huts and courtyards, spread out like pages in a picture book to underscore the simplicity and the complexity of Sembene’s central theme. The pivotal point is drawn through the story of Colle, a wife and mother whose own "purification" left her permanently damaged and unable to bear more children. She’s also been left with the lifelong agony of painful sexual intercourse that compels her to chew on her own hands during sex in order to endure the pain. She protected her own daughter, now of marriageable age, from the ordeal. When four young girls appear at her gate after running away from the ritual ceremony, she offers them asylum.

Her quick decision to protect the girls is met with outrage, scorn, fear, or sympathy from various community members. The red-robed women of the Sandiana come to the courtyard of Colle’s home demanding the children. Her husband away, Colle refuses and invokes the protection of Moolaade. Starting with her husband’s other wives, she begins to gather a little support, though all the men dismiss it as a trivial domestic matter that does not concern them. How wrong this assumption proves to be becomes clear as the villagers are drawn into the dispute. All their lives are affected. Some simply because of the order forbidding radios that the elders view as outside contamination, and all of them because of the threat to the underlying power structure at the very heart of their existence.

Ousmane’s viewpoint is unmistakably with the women’s cause, but he manages the difficult task of delicately delineating the viewpoints of the differing villagers, and makes a stereotype of no one. Peppered with shots of the village animals, he suggests comparison between the higher order human species, and the more sensible chickens and goats that hop lightly over a forbidden barrier and do what comes naturally. Their unselfconscious way contrasts with the myopic view of the villagers who cling to tradition, blind to the pain of its victims.

Sensitively incorporating the truth that is this but one aspect of Colle’s life, Sembene reveals her sophistication. She is a cheerful, contented woman, and a bold and plainspoken one. The irony of the outsider, contemptuously nicknamed Mercenarie, as the lone person to come to Colle’s aid when she is publicly beaten to force her to release the girls, carries global weight.

Reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s novel "Things Fall Apart", the inability to adapt to change dominates the old guard until something happens that they cannot control. In the real world, the life-threatening procedure by which the clitoris is removed from females when they approach puberty is still practiced in 38 of the 54 African states.