Critics reviews

In Ousmane Sembène's quietly majestic miniaturist epic, the scope is as ambitious as the storytelling is compact, the pageantry stark, the images direct. The format is declamatory griot theatre, thus the filmmaker's most African effort, multiple meanings imbued into actions (a jug smashed before a court meeting) and words ("If the lizard teases the turkey, it's because there's a tree nearby").

For Sembène, the Ceddo embody the resistance of a culture and a traditional way of life to the encroachments of Islam, Christianity and colonialism. This magnificent film is a comparable act of resistance, an attempt to write a segment of history for Africans and in African terms. It is a work of great organisational and thematic complexity, beautifully staged, mainly in depth, and possessing extraordinary kinesic grace and rhythmic control.

[Sembene] relishes the public debate, always a highlight of his films, and the typing of individuals into champions allows him to utilize his beautiful but amateur actors to their full extent. Sembene, with wondrous simplicity, achieves an operatic orchestration of raw forces similar to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.