Starring Ibrahim Ahmed and Toulou Kiki. Rating unavailable.

Timbuktu has come to denote the far ends of the earth, and in director Abderrahmane Sissako’s hands, the ancient Malian city does have a bleak, otherworldly beauty: narrow alleys flanked by red-clay houses, desert dunes punctuated by feathery green bushes, and nomads’ tents with gauzy curtains fluttering in the wind.

But Sissako also makes the struggles of its residents hugely immediate and accessible. Using lyrical visuals, he humanizes the story of a culture that’s suddenly squeezed by the fist of fundamentalism—the invasion by the Muslim extremist group Ansar Dine in 2012.

The dreamlike opening sequence involves a pickup truck full of jihadis chasing down a gazelle, shooting at it with their AK-47s. “Tire it out!” one yells. Then they turn their guns on old tribal fertility idols, bullets tearing off carved wooden breasts.

What follows is the same idea: extremists wearing down a population, tearing it apart, eventually leading to the brutality of Shariah law.

At first, the rules are just annoying. Women now have to wear the hijab, but jihadis stride around the city warning them to wear gloves and socks as well. Soon they are meting out violent punishments for absurd infractions. Haters of all beauty and art, they close in on a house full of musicians to devastating effect. And they show no mercy for a peaceful cattle herder (Ibrahim Ahmed) whose fight with a neighbour goes seriously awry.

Sissako is careful never to oversimplify. The jihadi leader (Abel Jafri) has his own hypocrisy, secretly smoking and longing for the ethereal wife of the cattle herder (Toulou Kiki). Soccer players kicking around an invisible ball when their sport is banned become a stunning metaphor for resilience.

Some of the acting is a bit iffy, and there are subtler details about the town’s different sects and languages that can be hard to follow. But if nothing else, Sissako’s powerful film proves that Timbuktu’s problems, far from being remote, are pretty much at the centre of the world’s most urgent issues right now.