In someone’s house, music can be heard: one man plays guitar and another drums lazily, while a woman sings along. Three men sit around outside to debate the latest football scores and the relative merits of Messi and Zidane. A young girl raises her cell phone to the sky, trying to get a signal. Out of the city, a teenager tries to teach an older man how to drive his Toyota.

These are all familiar scenes, here given an unfamiliar and disquieting backdrop: Timbuktu, Mali, under the rule of Islamist militants. In Abderrahmane Sissako’s Oscar-nominated drama, these militants, mostly young men, are shown imposing their own interpretation of Sharia law upon the city’s inhabitants. The group playing music are arrested, the men debating the football scores are all armed with rifles, and the two in the Toyota later oversee an execution.

For many, the city of Timbuktu brings to mind a distant and magical land, one remembered through nursery rhymes and ancient stories. And although the city’s recent history is intensely topical as well as tragic, Sissako preserves its mythical allure. Sweeping shots of rolling dunes under a bright moon and of calm waterbeds glistening in the sunshine give the events a sense of timelessness, whilst the clearly drawn central characters feel like they could come from fable.

The use of mixed tones is masterful, as laugh-out-loud comedy occasionally emerges in the occupiers’ own frailty and hypocrisy. The men attempt to assert their authority and masculinity but are undermined by their own faults: a rapper-turned-jihadist struggles to sound convincing on screen; an imposing militant becomes an embarrassed buffoon in his failed attempt to sneak another cigarette. Their conception of Islam is repeatedly shown to be shallow and self-serving, acting merely as a justification for the poor, lonely men who fill the fundamentalist ranks to take power by force. These antagonists are not the fearless, merciless warriors they would like to see themselves as; the acts of terror are made if anything more horrifying by the perpetrators’ humanity.

Yet beneath the tragedy, Sissako discovers genuine, joyous occasions for hope. These are not the grand, violent gestures frequently found in Hollywood movies, but quiet acts of everyday defiance. A woman commanded to wear gloves by a group of enforcers refuses again and again; another told to cover her head replies that the man should look away if he doesn’t want to see her hair. And despite the new laws, music can still be heard in the city at night.

This is a story as poignant as it is entertaining, one that succeeds in breaking through the inevitably paper-thin media portrayal of distant conflicts and gives a sense of the real people whose lives are at stake in these events. Superbly paced, movingly performed, and gripping from beginning to end, this is a film that deserves to be seen and cherished.