Produced over eleven years in Mali and Mauritania, the film offers a unique first-person account of Tuareg history and culture against a backdrop of conflict and exile. It is a story of transmission and memory, where the intimate meets the political, and the first film to portray the Tuareg world from within.
Undertows is a hieratic journey by filmmaker Intagrist el Ansari into the memory of his people. Framed as an intimate letter and testament to his son, it recounts the history of resistance and the culture of the Tuaregs of the Kel Ansar—the suzerain tribe of the Timbuktu region from which the author descends. Shaken by colonisation, sedentarisation, droughts, rebellions, and cyclical exile, the Tuaregs continue to fight for survival. At once a testimony to ongoing conflicts and a narrative carried by storytelling, the film is also an existential journey between sand and sea, exile and living memory.
Intagrist el Ansari says: “I grew up with the abstract image of a father who disappeared far too soon. An ephemeral, almost elusive image, an image whose strength has always stayed with me. In order to recapture and reweave the broken threads of a memory I wanted to pass on to my son, I wanted to take a journey through space and time. To retrace the footsteps of the area that shaped my childhood, to spend time with the elders who shaped our contemporary history. Scholars, wise men and elders, heirs to oral and written traditions: emblematic figures who knew and rubbed shoulders with my father. Through their words, I want to link my son's imagination to this ancestral heritage before his memory is permanently etched. In this approach, the quest for an intimate history merges with the search for a grand history.”
Biography
Born in the Timbuktu region of Mali, he has lived in Mauritania for the past ten years. A documentary filmmaker, writer, and freelance author, El Ansari spent his childhood in the desert before moving to France, where he lived for more than a decade during the turbulence of the North Mali conflict in the 1990s. In 2014, he published Echo Saharien, l’inconsolable nostalgie, his first novel. As in his literary and journalistic work, his documentary practice focuses on Saharan nomadic cultures and the transformations they are undergoing. Undertows – A Tuareg Tale is his most recent film, a feature-length documentary in which the intimate intersects with the political.
The film will be screened at De Balie Cultural Centre in Amsterdam on 4 October 2025 at 5:30 p.m., as part of the Maghreb Film Festival. Intagrist el Ansari will be present at the screening.
Tickets here at De Balie.
Another screening will be held on 2 October at 9 p.m. at Kinepolis, Haarlem.
In an article for ZAM, Intagrist el Ansari wrote about the French anti-jihadist forces’ newfound alliance with Tuareg rebels in northern Mali.
