Two brothers, the rich Lebanese merchants Yacine and Amoudé Jabert, do their transactions in the bar of Mademoiselle Edith in Burkina Faso. Their mother dreams of returning to Lebanon, but the youngest son, Amoudé, has a child with his African girlfriend Fati, and the corrupt Yacine sees his profits grow with smuggling, lying and deceipt. He supplies illegal import-export services to the upper echelons of the country and gets in return control of the most lucrative raw-materials market in the country, with which he can outdo the African competition. The brothers go from bad to worse. When Amoudé accidentally kills a child in a car crash, Yacine manages to keep him out of jail. In the meantime, Fati and ‘Who Cares’, an African informer for the brothers, are cast out because of their liaison with them. The moral of the story is in the elusive, coverless book that ‘Who Cares’ losesat the start of the film and finds again at the end: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Silmande Tourbillon is one of the most impressive films made in Africa in the last year. It is a modern urban drama (the maker calls it a dramatic comedy) providing an unadorned and probably controversial image of the involvement of a Lebanese family in economic and social corruption in Burkina Faso.
